


The Strong Tower

by BuggreAlleThis



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Amputation, Angels Are Not Nice, Bathing/Washing, Body Horror, Burns, Car Accidents, Consent Discussion, Crowley finally gets to put a gun in the waistband of his trousers and he feels really cool, Don’t copy to another site, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Exorcisms, Gore, Gun Violence, Heaven is Terrible (Good Omens), Homophobia, Hurt Aziraphale (Good Omens), Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Incantation Bowls, Intricate Rituals, Kidnapping, Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Consensual Touching, POV Outsider, Possession, Post-Apocalypse, Public Humiliation, Punishment, Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Summoning Circles, Torture, Wing Grooming, Wings, non-consensual wing-touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-05-31 17:44:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 41,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19430959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BuggreAlleThis/pseuds/BuggreAlleThis
Summary: After the failed executions, a vengeful angel takes it upon herself to neutralise the threat presented by Crowley and Aziraphale.





	1. Reunion

Crawly was sunbathing.

Hell had been so pleased with him about the whole apple thing that he’d been given a promotion, and an indefinite assignment to Earth. He liked Earth far better than Hell; far fewer people, and far more light. He luxuriated, letting the radiation seep right down through him. He didn’t _sleep_ , not yet, but he’d always associate the warmth and the silence and the darkness with some stolen measure of peace.

Until, that is, he was rudely brought back to reality by a bare foot smashing down on his face.

“What the He- what the _fuck_?” he shouted, easily toppling his assailant and sinking inch long claws into its chest. He snarled when he saw it was the _angel_ , the stupid angel from the garden. The angel who sheltered him with his wing, and who offered him a shy goodbye when Crawly had to go Down and report. “What did I do to deserve that?!”

He blinked the blood away, and the angel looked _terrible_. His face was grey, and streaked with tears and dust. “What did you do? You ruined everything! You got them cast out!”

“You’ve changed your tune,” Crawly said, and broke the angel’s arm. The angel howled, and tried to batter him off. “They chose to do it. Free will.”

“They wouldn’t have done it if they knew how wrong it was!” the angel said, and this brought forth a flood of new tears. Crawly glared at him, bloody annoyed now, and fixed his arm. He sat back on the hot sand, and the angel sat up too.

The angel fell over again.

“Have you been at the incense or something?” Crawly said.

The angel tried to manoeuvre himself up. “Leave me alone!”

“You’re the one who found _me_ ,” Crawly pointed out. “ _You_ leave _me_ alone.”

“I want to be alone!” the angel said, as though he hadn’t heard him, and Crawly blinked. It was rare that he blinked, but this warranted it. Angels hated being alone. At least, fallen angels did. The unfallen ones didn’t know what _alone_ meant – they were always in choirs, or hosts, grooming each other’s wings or flying in a mingling of essences, or sitting in silent communion.

Except this one. This angel was still pitching back and forwards like a piece of cork on water. Crawly felt seasick just watching him, so he grabbed his shoulder. “Oi!”

The angel stopped, leaning heavily against Crawly’s outstretched hand. He looked at him, and his face crumpled. “Oh, your poor nose,” he said, _as though he hadn’t been the bastard who broke it_ ; he reached out, and with a sharp click Crawly’s nose was whole again, and the pain was gone. “I’m sorry. I, I didn’t mean it.”

“You definitely did.”

“That’s even worse,” the angel agreed, and started crying again. Crawly watched him and pondered. This stupid sod was on Earth, and if Crawly got a promotion from Hell to Earth, that meant…

“They demoted you.”

The angel nodded. He brought his knees up to his chest, and buried his face in his arms. This stopped the unbalanced to-and-fro at least.

“Well, you had a free choice to. You gave it away.”

“Shush!” the angel said, and looked up and around in fear. There was nothing but sand and sky. “I, I lost it. I put it down.”

“No, you gave to them.”

“Shush, _please_. I wouldn’t have if I knew how wicked it was. I wouldn’t. I’m not wicked.”

“ _I_ don’t think it was wicked.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think is wicked, you’re a demon!”

“Yeah,” Crawly said, stung, and angry at himself for feeling so. “Which means I’m the expert here.”

“Oh. Oh. Maybe… But it wasn’t for that. They don’t know about that.” The angel’s eyes widened. “Oh, please don’t tell them!”

“How exactly am I going to tell them? Slither up to them and tattle? You’re the first angel I’ve spoken to who hasn’t tried to smite me on sight.”

The angel looked so _worried_ all the time, it gave Crawly a headache. “Do you think I ought to?”

“Rather you didn’t, to be honest,” Crawly said sarcastically. The angel, however, clearly didn’t know what sarcasm was. “I probably ought to be trying to kill _you_.”

“Please don’t,” the angel said. “If I lose this body so quickly they’ll be furious. I don’t want to be demoted again.”

Crawly rolled his eyes. “Fine.” This was… not what the enmity of the Rebellion had felt like. Maybe it was different, when you had a personal nemesis. They were both learning nemisissing as they went, he supposed. “What were you demoted for then, if not the sword thing?”

“For. Well. For letting you talk the humans into eating from the Tree. I was meant to be guarding it, but there was a beautiful white flower with pink dots all over it, and there was a _bee_ in it – I don’t know if you’ve seen them, they have iridescent little wings, and the pollen sticks to their little legs – they’re gold and black, just like your eyes, they’re lovely – and then this bee flew out of the flower and I wanted to see where it went, whether it was going back to the other bees and what their home looked like, and when I got back…”

“Yeah.” Crawly did _not_ feel guilty. That would be a very un-demonic thing to feel, and as he had obviously not been great at being angelic he thought he ought to at least _try_ to be demonic instead. “Well. Dereliction of duty, I suppose.”

“It wasn’t dereliction! I didn’t know – I didn’t _think_ – the bee was just so lovely and-“

“And you wanted to see where it went, yeah.” _What a fucking idiot_ , Crawly thought, but the thought didn’t have as much venom or contempt as it should. “So they demoted you for stupidity.”

The angel nodded miserably. “They said that God must have created me stupid, so it’s not my fault, but I obviously can’t be trusted with any important jobs Upstairs. They said I could try to make up for it by looking after the humans down here and making sure _you_ don’t mess them about too much.”

“Well,” Crawly said. “I think you’re doing a good job so far. I’m too busy chatting to mess them about. You’re distracting me from my evil purpose.”

“Oh. I suppose so,” the angel said with the first flickering of a small smile, and wiped his eyes. “I’m Aziraphale.”

“They call me Crawly,” said Crawly. Aziraphale didn’t seem to notice the distinction. He was still clinging to his own knees, trying to make himself as small as possible. “So. Indefinite assignment?”

“Yes. For the moment at least,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t like it. There’s just so much of… everything. Every grain of sand, I can feel them all on my feet, I can hear them shifting all over each other!”

Crawly looked around at the wide expanse of absolute nothingness, and thought of the crowding and clawing and screams of Hell. “Soon get used to it. It’s meant to be massive – comparatively, I mean. Matter of perspective. It’s not just this and the Garden, though. There’s all sorts of stuff.”

“I don’t want stuff,” Aziraphale said, and that disgusting tearful look was coming back. “I want to go back home. I want the others.”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” Crawly said, and seriously considered breaking his arm again. That’d give him something to cry about. “Weirdo. If I’d been demoted just for looking at something God made, right, I’d want to be as far away as possible from those bastards.”

Aziraphale had gone bright pink, and was looking at his knees again. “Well, of course you would. You’re-“

“A demon, yes, and you’re an angel,” Crawly snapped.

“Yes, and don’t call them bastards. … what is a bastard?”

Crawly shrugged. “Anyway, _angel_ , it’s been absolutely splendid, but I have work to do.” He stood up, and looked down at Aziraphale. The height gave him a new perspective, and he indulgenced in a second blink. The angel’s once-white robe was now brown with dirt, but… but the back was dark with blood. “What happened to your-“

Aziraphale gave an outraged gasp, and shoved at Crawly’s knees. “Don’t look at me! You’re not allowed to look at me!”

“Demon. Heaven’s rules don’t apply,” Crawly’s mouth said while his mind caught up. “Oh. _Oh_. You’re- were? Where. Where’s your other pair?”

“I _told_ you! I was demoted!”

“So they _cut two of your wings off?_ Shit, it was only two, right? Not four?”

“Two. It was very quick,” Aziraphale said defensively. “It didn’t hurt.”

“You lying liar,” Crawly said. “Besides, that’s not the point! They can’t go cutting wings off angels! They’re meant to be the good guys!”

“They _are – we are_ ,” Aziraphale said with a haughty glare. “So I deserved it.”

“What, because I’m good at my job they cut _your_ wings off?”

“Yes! Because I was being bad at _my_ job. It makes logical sense, Crawly – Heaven is _good_ , and so… so the things Heaven does must be good too. Do you see?”

“No,” Crawly said, and turned away with a huff to look at the horizon instead.

“It’s all right. I’ll explain it to you.”

“I don’t need it explained, you moron, I disagree!”

“Oh. _Well_ ,” Aziraphale said in a prim little voice, and then faltered. He followed Crawly’s gaze. “Where are you going to go now?”

“I don’t know. Follow the humans, I guess.”

“I should stop you.”

“I’d like to see you try. You can’t even stand up straight.”

“I’m still getting used to it! I’m all unbalanced,” Aziraphale said. He uncurled, and put his hands on the sand experimentally. “I keep pitching forwards, I’m used to more weight on my back.”

Crawly snickered, and Aziraphale turned around to look over his shoulders. “What?”

“I don’t know. I just have this feeling that it’s the sort of thing I should find funny. I’ll figure out why later.”

Aziraphale had shifted so that he was on his knees; he stood, and immediately began to lean forwards. Crawly reached out to stop him falling. _What was he_ doing _?_ He was a demon, he wasn’t meant to go around helping angels. He could get into all sorts of trouble for that. That wasn’t _him_ any more. He needed to scarper; Aziraphale’s idiocy was obviously contagious. He stepped back, and the angel toppled.

“You’re pathetic. Try walking around a bit. I’m going to look for the humans.” He turned himself back into a snake, instinctively knowing he’d be able to cross the desert much faster in that form. “See you later!”

“Wait!” Aziraphale shouted, but Crawly was already off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proverbs 18:10: The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous run into it and are safe.
> 
> In Genesis 3:24 God “drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.” By the time of the book, “Technically Aziraphale was a Principality, but people made jokes about that these days.” The cherubim have four wings: “two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies” (Ezekiel 1:11).


	2. Exorcism

The commuters disembarked, and flooded up to the streets of London like a waterfall in reverse. The train shrieked, a painful sound that dragged after it into the tunnel. For a single moment, the platform was empty, and in that moment, the mosaics of Tottenham Court Road Underground station were lit with a cold blue light.

Naqamiel stepped onto the escalator, and the only reason her heel did not become stuck in the metal grooves was because neither shoe nor escalator would have _dared_. She was uncomfortable. She disliked the limitations of a human body and its myriad little inefficiencies. The electricity of unspent rage was sparking painfully under her skin. She had been so ready. She’d been _excited_.

Thousands of years training in the slaughter of demons, and now, instead of the Great War, there is a lowercase letter _accord_ between Heaven and Hell. Not a peace, certainly not, but a détente formed of mutual outrage at a third, unexpected enemy.

It wasn’t the Great War, of course. But they would have to do.

And, strangely, she was looking forward to seeing Aziraphale again.

*

It was the fourth day of the rest of their lives, but was now, of course, it was also the first day again.

They’d barely been apart since the Ritz. Nothing had been _said_ , but they’d been talking constantly, drinking almost equally constantly – champagne, then wine, then all the odd bottles Aziraphale had collected over the years. Crowley tried to drive to his flat to pick up some of his own, until his panic and the absence of Aziraphale made him turn around before he was half-way there. Once they got bored of going to the Tesco Express down the road from the bookshop Crowley had just started conjuring drinks they remembered into existence. They’d spent half the night just on Falernians they’d known and loved, and Aziraphale had been delighted with Crowley’s attempt at plum wine, but it was the mead that finished them. Crowley had had a little snooze on Aziraphale’s sofa, and Aziraphale had lain down on the ceiling and tried to stop the floor from spinning.

It wasn’t particularly healthy, obviously, even with periodically sobering themselves up a little and curing hangovers when they threatened. There were _words_ sitting between them, always. Even worse, there were _emotions_. Not just the nice ones, the ones bubblier than champagne and more intoxicatingly warm than port.

Sometimes, smoke would unfurl its tendrils in the periphery of Crowley’s vision. The wine would make the light splinter, and for a desperate second he’d think he could see flames licking the books. He'd feel the heat, smell the stink of petrol and burning hair and burning leather and red-hot metal. Sometimes, he would see the binary stars of Alpha Centauri glitter. He would feel the ghost of despair leeching the light from him.

Sometimes Aziraphale felt his chest squeeze tight with fear: fear of the angels, fear of the demons. He hadn’t Fallen, he thought. Crowley had said it was painful, once. That it burnt. He didn’t burn. But he could feel an icy chill, like that of air screaming past you once you reached your terminal velocity. He missed Heaven, not like the connection had been ripped out of him, but like one missed a dearly beloved relative whose dark and cruel secret had suddenly been revealed. He felt hurt. He felt betrayed. He felt lost, and when he did, he’d cling onto Crowley’s hand like it was driftwood. And Crowley would squeeze his hand back, and he’d know that Crowley understood.

When that happened, they’d sober up, and Aziraphale would make tea. Then they’d play a game of chess. Aziraphale was by far the better educated in the game, and a more subtle strategist, but Crowley had a flair for unpredictable tactics that usually left them quite evenly matched. They alternated colours, of course. And then the knots of swallowed tears would soften and fade, and then they’d have some cakes or biscuits, and once the pot was finished they’d top up the teacups with new wine.

Aziraphale’s forfeit for losing their last match was to open the shop. Crowley secretly thought that some vague gesture towards normality would probably help with everything, a hypocrisy he took care not to examine too closely. He was happy with however long it took Aziraphale to realise, to say…

Well, that was a lie, but one he told himself once an hour or so, so it felt like a truth if he didn’t poke it too much. Aziraphale had just lost Heaven, and that was one stinging fucker of a disillusionment. Crowley knew that from painful experience. They’d been through Armageddon together. He’d gone to Hell for him. That all took some processing. And the angel was a slower processor than the ancient computer in the back room.

Anyway, he’d come to regret the shop idea.

“No, Harry, _no_. Don’t touch that. That’s very naughty. Mummy said _no touching_.”

It was no fun playing against Aziraphale when he was so distracted, Crowley thought sulkily. _He_ ought to be the centre of the angel’s focus, not the sticky toddler squirming in his mother’s arms over by the Austens and the Brontës. Aziraphale was watching them with a very unangelic look on his face, and Crowley was four moves from checkmate.

“Pastry,” he said, and Aziraphale looked around as though just remembering he was there. That definitely rankled. “I need a coffee, and you need a pastry. I’ll run over the road.”

Aziraphale finally smiled at him. “Thank you. I ought to stay, to keep an eye… If they have any chocolate...”

“I never expected you’d get up,” Crowley says with a teasing grin. “Chocolate, got it.”

“Oh, and cream.”

“And if it’s one or the other?” Aziraphale smiled blandly at him. “Right, of course. Silly me.”

“Thank you, my dear,” Aziraphale said, and winced as Harry, who has been sucking on his fist, reached out for a first edition of _The Power and the Glory._

The bell jingled as Crowley left, and again a moment later. Even the thought of one of those lovely cream pastries couldn’t distract Aziraphale from his anxiety, but a shift in the air did. A presence like an Arctic wind, or a simoom. Dry, very dry, and enough to steal the breath from the lungs.

A young woman, with blond hair in a tight ponytail. She was dressed like one of the thousands of other young, professional women in London on a lunch break: the grey trouser suit, the tasteful handbag. There were two major differences. The lack of phone in one hand, and the golden eyes. The bottom of Aziraphale’s stomach dropped, and his blood turned to ice-melt. Two sharp pains ran up his back.

“Aziraphale,” she said, as though his name was a swear word. She reached into her handbag, drew out a very big, very black handgun, and pointed it at his head. “Long time, no see.”

Aziraphale blinked at the gun and looked up. _CrowleyCrowleyCrowley_ , his mind screamed. “Naqamiel.” He aimed for calm politeness, but without thinking he reached around his back with his left hand and pressed it tightly against his ribs.

Naqamiel grinned. “You remember me. How sweet. Where is the demon?”

Through the glass in the doors, Aziraphale saw Crowley skid on the pavement outside. He hoped he would think to silence the bell- yes, he had, his clever, brilliant Crowley. Crowley looked over his sunglasses, and glanced sharply to the left. Aziraphale’s right.

Aziraphale looked back up. “Demon?”

Naqamiel gripped him by the neck and squeezed, pulling him up out of his chair as though he weighed nothing at all. She pushed the gun between Aziraphale’s eyes. “The demon. Crowley. I know you know where he is. His evil stench is everywhere. I don’t know how you can stand it, but then… you’re basically Fallen yourself, aren’t you? Now. I won’t ask again.”

Crowley was standing behind her now, completely silent. He remembered Naqamiel from the War, as hard and unwavering as an anvil. The fierce joy in her as she struck, the dizzying and dazzling precision with which she wielded two swords. But he was _fucking_ fast, and had far more to lose. He waited, unblinking.

“Oh – oh. _Crowley_. _That_ demon. Well – well, we, we actually aren’t talking,” Aziraphale said, lying terribly. “We – we fell out. He. He spilt coffee on one of my Wildes?”

Then Harry’s mother, who had been listening in, moved around one of the bookshelves to eavesdrop more efficiently. She saw the gun. She screamed.

Several things happened at once. Naqamiel looked around to source the scream, and pulled the trigger. Aziraphale dove to the right. And Crowley gripped Naqamiel’s head and twisted. She dropped like a stone, and her handbag gave a dull, metallic _clang_ on the floor.

A Tiffany lampshade shattered. Books thudded to the floor. Crowley would have nearly discorporated himself by way of slipping carpet if it hadn’t been for the convenient weight of Naqamiel’s body; he spun around the counter, dropping to his knees.

There was blood on the side of Aziraphale’s head, matting in his hair, and plenty more in his ear. But it was a flesh wound, Crowley assured himself as he miracled the wound closed. Just a flesh wound.

Oh, it had been so close. Oh, it had been too close. His entire body was shaking.

Aziraphale sat up, dazed, and then winced as his eardrum was repaired with a _pop_. “Ah. Good Lord.”

“You’re all right, angel,” Crowley said, shouting it to himself in his own head. He helped him up. Aziraphale was trembling almost as much as he was. “Well done.”

Aziraphale winced again, and looked wearily at mother and child, both now screaming.

Then, suddenly, only one was. The woman abruptly stopped, dropped the toddler, and turned to face them.

“Shit-!” Crowley dived, taking full advantage of his double-jointed spine, and managed to catch the little boy before he brained himself on the floor. The mother leapt for the gun in the corpse’s hand. Aziraphale was too slow to move around the desk in time to grab it, but his wings had a far greater range than his arms did; in an instant they were out, and the woman was thrown hard against a bookshelf.

Aziraphale scrambled for the gun, and watched in horror as Naqamiel forced the woman’s body to stand, broken arms hanging limply at her side. “Still white, Aziraphale? But only two, now.” She and Aziraphale stared at each other. She looked down to where the gun shook in Aziraphale’s hands, and smiled. She forced the body to take one step, and then another.

He could do it. He _could_ do it. He’d been willing to shoot the Antichrist, and he had been a _child_.

But that was to save the world.

This was just to save _himself_. A young woman whose only crime (grievous as it might otherwise have seemed) was to step into his bookshop. Shooting this body would merely inconvenience Naqamiel, but the woman would die.

He _really_ regretted the fact that he’d proven to Heaven that angels could possess people.

The gun was useless to Aziraphale, and both of them knew it. He looked at Crowley and tossed it; Naqamiel followed the arc of it across the shop, and Aziraphale raised his hands. “I, Aziraphale, Principality, angel of the Lord, adjure you by the living God, the Most High! Leave Her daughter!”

Naqamiel’s eyes widened, and they both held their breath, straining against each other. Crowley held the wailing toddler tightly. His heart pounded. Aziraphale had called upon God, and either the call would fail, and Aziraphale would know for certain that he was no longer an angel of the Lord, and the shop would be filled with a troop of furious angels ready to kill one of the Fallen for the crime of exorcism (and incinerate any demons within the local area) or it would _work_.

For the briefest moment, Crowley was sure he could see white flickers of flame across Aziraphale’s brow, like a diadem. Around the woman’s hands were flickers of gold. Aziraphale was asserting his right as a Principality, Crowley realised – a Principality was far, far below the cherubim, but the protection of humans was their divinely ordained trust. They had never discussed Aziraphale’s demotion since that one conversation six thousand years ago.

The woman’s body slumped to the ground, and Naqamiel was gone. Aziraphale collapsed in a dead faint. Crowley looked up to Heaven for a long, aching moment, in the now silent bookshop, and then placed the boy on the floor.* He staggered up and put the gun into the back of his waistband. He’d always wanted to do that.

He went to the boy’s mother, to heal her arms – oh, and ribs, and pelvis. He wiped her memory, and didn’t bother to give her a nice dream. He was exhausted, and terrified, and oddly heartsick. “Gas explosion,” he said as she woke up, despite the complete absence of fire or smoke.

“Harry? Harry, oh, oh, darling! Thank you, thank you – you _saved_ my _baby_ -“

“No problem. Go,” Crowley said, and went to Aziraphale.

* Despite his standard secular British upbringing, Harry would later astonish his entire family by joining a Cistercian monastery, where he looked after the library.


	3. Genizah

The light wasn’t bright. It wasn’t the blinding white of lightning. It was very, very soft.

Aziraphale had the impression of standing in a quiet garden in the dead of night, the only light coming from the stars. He looked down at his hands, and there was a soft glow to them against the subtle shifting darkness of indigo and slate and velvet blackness, below which there might be plants, and clear, trickling water. He remembered another garden, and the darkness, and the stars. That had been very different – charged with terror, broken by weeping.

And in the soft, dim light, there was a still, small voice.

“Buck up, Aziraphale.”

*

Crowley was beginning to panic. He kept glancing at the door. They needed to do something; he hasn’t been exorcised in hundreds of years, and he didn’t even know what it _did_ to an angel, but if that psychopath were to come back Crowley didn’t think his lock will hold her for long. “Hey. Hey. Aziraphale, come on. _Please,_ angel.”

Aziraphale opened his eyes, groggily, and stared right past Crowley, up at the ceiling. “It worked,” he breathed out, and his eyes filled with tears.

Crowley’s breath caught. He was surprised that he didn’t look away. The bitterness was not as galling as he had expected. It was there, the old anger, the old hurt, but it was eclipsed by a vast relief, by protective love, and by a whisper of something fleeting, some glimmer of light that he refused to look at. He looked down at Aziraphale instead.

“Of course it did, angel. You were magnificent. Come on. Can you stand?”

Aziraphale nods, and Crowley places his hand under his elbow to help him. “I need to make sure she can’t come back in.”

“Please do. Go- Sa- Urgh. I remember her.”

“So do I, my dear,” Aziraphale said. He was looking down at the floor, studiously avoiding both Naqamiel’s corpse and Crowley’s feet. He forced a brave little smile that did devastating things to Crowley’s heart. He reached over his shoulder and patted his back, in between the shoulder blades.

It took Crowley a good few seconds to realise what Aziraphale meant. “What? _No_.”

“Ah. Yes. It was… surgical, as far as I remember…” Aziraphale shakes himself, like a bird shaking dust out of his wings. His two wings. “She’s very dangerous. She’s the type to _take pleasure in a job well done_.”

_So, pretty much their opposite_ , Crowley thought. The hatred he feels drops another point on the pH scale. Anyone who makes Aziraphale try to look _stoic_ has earnt an automatic death sentence in his book. “What do we do?”

“Well, she’s still an _angel_ ,” Aziraphale said. “Shove over that stepladder, there’s a good chap.”

Crowley held out his hand to help Aziraphale ascend. The angel’s hand was warm. Aziraphale met his gaze as he stepped up, and that horrible _brave_ expression relaxed from his face a little. With his finger, he wrote a shin, a dalet, and a yod above the door.

“ _Shomer Daltot Yisrael_ ,” Aziraphale said reverently, and Crowley looked away with a sick, longing discomfort. He flexed his fingers. He felt wild with envy and jealousy, and didn’t know which felt worse. “ _V’hoshieinu l’ma-an sh’mecha_.”

The letters burnt blue for a moment, and then the flame was gone.

“There.” Aziraphale landed beside him, and pushed the stepladder back towards a bookshelf. He looked up at his handiwork for a moment, and then down at the carpet. “Hmm. What are we going to do about the body?”

“Shove it on the escalator Upstairs and let it make a mess,” Crowley said, and took heart from the disapproving look Aziraphale gave him. He grinned. “Oh, fine.” He snapped his fingers, and the body was gone.

“Where did you send it?”

“Told you. Escalator.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes, and Crowley finally felt able to give a shaky laugh. He bends over to pick up the handbag. “This is pretty heavy- shit!”

He didn’t so much drop it as throw it down on the floor; he ducked behind Aziraphale and looked over his shoulder as the angel picked up the bag.

Inside was nothing other than a clip of ammunition, two silver bowls, and a large lump of bitumen, stuck to the bag’s silk lining.

“Urgh, that could have been nasty,” Crowley said, with a shudder that ran all the way down his body.

“Don’t be silly, they’re both facing up,” Aziraphale said as he removed the bowls and placed them on the table. Both were polished to a high gleam, the spiralling Hebrew and Aramaic deep black in comparison. In the bottom of one was the Tetragrammaton. In the bottom of the other was a coiled, knotted black snake. Aziraphale’s eyes roved over them, taking in the bitumen. “She was going to discorporate you with the gun, my dear,” he said, and reached around to grip Crowley’s sleeve. “And then…”

“And then trap me in there,” Crowley said, eyes on the snake.

“Seal the two bowls together.” Aziraphale traced the letters with the tip of one finger. The prayers inside acted rather like a current of water, swirling down a plug hole – round and round the demon went, carried by the words, and then was held in the bottom of the bowl. “And with the Name inside, I wouldn’t be able to break you out. I don’t know who would.”

“So we destroy them,” Crowley said.

“This one, I could…” Aziraphale says. “The one with the Name, no. But. I wonder if we shouldn’t keep them.”

“Keep them? Have you gone _100%_ _mental_?” Crowley gave a strangled cry. “They’re my own personal prison cell for all eternity, you daft feathered-“

“Yes, yes, dear heart, I _know,_ ” Aziraphale said. He let go of Crowley’s sleeve to hold his hand instead. “But right now we have the advantage of knowing what her plan was. _Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak_ , hm? Instead of destroying them and bringing us all back to even odds, why don’t we compromise them instead? Let her think she has the advantage.”

Crowley looked deeply, _deeply_ sceptical. “Compromise them?”

“Yes. It’s all the _text_ – Heaven knows why she has them in silver, you’re not a _werewolf_ – simple pottery would have been just as efficacious. The words are the only things that matter.”

“We could hide the one with the- this one,” Crowley said, pointing.

“We certainly can’t destroy it.” Aziraphale picked it up and gazed within, eyes lingering on the words around the Tetragrammaton. _Kadosh kadosh kadosh…_

“What about the other one? The snake one?”

“Hm?” Aziraphale looked up. “What about the other one?”

“What if she just… you know. Traps me under it.”

“Oh, like that nice Rav Shmuel in Nippur?” Crowley and Aziraphale had both been in the area in the seventh century after the Round Table Experiment went tits-up; they had run into each other in the street, and Crowley promised that as soon he was done tempting some rabbi’s daughter to meet her boyfriend they’d go for a drink.

“I was under that thing for four hours!”

“You’d have been under it for a lot longer if I hadn’t been able to convince him that you were harmless.”

Crowley’s forked tongue emerged in his fury. “ _Harmlesss_?”

“Anyway, that’s what you get for trying to tempt that lovely girl,” Aziraphale said primly, picking up the other bowl. “You were lucky I didn’t think you’d just gone for a nap. But don’t worry, that bowl was _far_ better than this one. It was so good I asked him to sign it for me. It’s in the bottom drawer, in the desk.”

Crowley’s eyes stretched wide behind his glasses. “… you _still have it_?”

“It was a really marvellous bowl!”

“What if I’d got caught under it?!”

“Really, my dear, that’s why it’s in the bottom drawer. Besides, it’s not active. I’ve thought of putting it in the threshold in case any of your lot decided to pay a visit, but I didn’t want you to get caught in it again. I know you found it stressful.”

“ _Stressssful_ ,” Crowley says, and folds his arms.

“My dear boy, don’t _sulk_. That one was a good bowl, but this one is clearly one of a pair. She must have written it herself… No imagination. But none of the Names in this one, more importantly, so I can just score a couple of the letters out… There. A freshly hatched demonlet could break out of that one on its own.”

He offered it to Crowley, who refused to be mollified. “It’ll still work if she seals me in it with the other one.”

“Well, yes,” Aziraphale said, and suddenly he was holding a gas torch. “So hold it still for me.”

Crowley felt the bottom of his stomach drop away; the very thought of it was like missing a step in the dark. “You’re… going to _melt the Name_?”

“No!” Aziraphale looked utterly shocked, and immortally offended. “How could you think – I could _never_ \- No. No, but I can cut it out and you can make it look the same. Then we can drive round and put the real bottom in the genizah. If she gets it back and doesn’t look at it properly, you’ll be able to break out of it if she _does_ discorporate you.”

Crowley exhaled the last remnants of his annoyance, and took the scored bowl with a nasty look at it. He squatted and held the second bowl still on the floor. “Do _not_ burn your bookshop down again. Seriously.”

“I won’t if you keep still, and keep an eye on it. Careful, fingers,” Aziraphale said, fiddling with the nozzle until a blue flame as pointed as a dagger leapt out of it.

It took two minutes. Aziraphale was sweating by the end of it, worried about burning either the Name or Crowley’s fingers; he breathed out icy air over it it so that the bottom of the bowl fell through, like a new, chunky coin. “There.”

“Is it all right?”

Aziraphale blew on the bowl to cool it, and turned the little silver plate over. “It’s all right. Thank God.” The four little marks remained pristine in the shining silver, and Crowley squirmed away from the sight of them. “Oh, right.” Aziraphale picked it up with a smile that was both reverent and somehow _fond_ ; he stared at it with a lovelorn little sigh before he pocketed it. _You can take the angel out of Heaven, but you can’t take Heaven out of the angel_ , Crowley thought, rolling his eyes.

“West Central Liberal’s closest,” Aziraphale said. “It’d be just as fast for me to walk there as for you to drive us.”

“Oh, no. First rule of horror films: don’t split up.”

“We’re not in a horror film, Crowley. This is real life.”

“Look, you’re the expert on textual stuff, yes? Now, I’m the expert. Trust me.”

“You certainly are the expert in terrible films – all right, all right, we’ll drive. Or walk together.”

“No, we’ll drive,” Crowley said. He always felt safer in the Bentley. “Come on.”

*

Unlike churches, Crowley had no problem in entering synagogues, though he stuck beside Aziraphale’s elbow in case anyone spotted him and decided to be a have-a-go hero. For protection. Aziraphale’s protection, obviously, not his.

Aziraphale instead chatted to his friend Harry as though nothing whatsoever was the problem; they tried to find an envelope to put the metal medal in for the genizah, Aziraphale asked after his wife’s cyst biopsy, Harry asked whether Ezra would be able to do that series of lectures on Maimonides again for them.

“He can _if we’re still around then_ ,” Crowley said, with a very pointed glare.

“Oh, you’re leaving London?”

“No, no – of course I can do the lectures. I’m glad everyone liked them. _Yes_ , my dear, I’m coming. I’ll see you soon, Harry!” Crowley had to resist the urge to drag Aziraphale out by his collar before he met another mate and got them invited to Shabbat.

“Crowley, there’s no need to be _rude_.”

“I think we have every reason to be _brisk_ ,” Crowley said, hopping into the Bentley and opening the passenger-side door from the inside. “You know. Given the fucking _Terminator_ coming for us. I hope she’s not waiting back at the bloody shop.”

“Oh, no – surely it’ll be weeks before they give her a new body. At least. I wonder whether they know what she’s up to…”

“I’d guess plausible deniability, knowing them lot,” Crowley said as he swung them out against the flow of traffic. The tirades of angry beeps soothes his spirit a little. “All depends on whether she’s successful… Anyway, I meant what I said. We need a plan for when they do decide to kit her out again.”

“All right. We’ll get some food in, and we can barricade ourselves in the bookshop for a while. I can do some more work on the windows to keep us safe, and we can lie low until we know more.” Aziraphale looked cheerful, and he gave Crowley a sidelong glance. “It’ll keep the customers out at least.”

“Sounds perfect. I mean, sounds like a good plan. Solid.” He drove in silence for a hundred metres. “And no splitting up, for whatever reason.”

“I know, my dear,” Aziraphale says fondly. “… I do trust you, you know.”

“I know,” Crowley said. He exhaled sharply through his nose. “I knew it was too good to be true. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I don’t know what to make of it. They’ve given her a body, but it’s just her. I think you’re right. They’ve tried their- what did Gabriel call it?”

“ _Extraordinary rendition_ ,” Crowley said with gritted teeth. He had yet to tell Aziraphale the entirety of what had been said in Heaven. “Well, now they’re just going for the classic rogue agent assassination attempt. If she succeeds, great; if she fails, nothing to do with them.”

“I can’t believe they’d try to do all this to a fellow angel, and without God’s permission. I mean, She wouldn’t have let me perform that exorcism earlier, would She? If She’d requested it.”

“Who knows. _God_ only knows. She does whatever She wants, and- Maybe She just didn’t want the game to finish too quickly.”

“I don’t think so. I think She still-“

“After what you did? After what _we_ did? Think _nothing,_ angel – think nothing of Her, and you won’t be disappointed.”

“Let’s not fight,” Aziraphale said in that small voice which always made Crowley want to discorporate himself. “… Uriel said I think too much.”

“Yeah, well, maybe Uriel’s right,” Crowley snapped. “…shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“You did. It’s all right.” Aziraphale stared out of the window. It was beginning to rain.

“I didn’t. You _know_ I didn’t. I like it when you think. First thing I liked about you,” Crowley said. “I just… I don’t want to talk about God right now.”

“It’s all right to be angry with Her, you know. I was so angry, when I spoke to the Metatron, and I realised… I felt so lost. _How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?_ ”

Crowley’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t _fucking_ right. “ _How long, O Lord, will you look on? Rescue me from their ravages, my life from the lions!_ My life from _your_ lions, it should be.”

Aziraphale’s smile was sad as only an angel’s could be. “ _Trust in the Lord, and do good; so you will live in the land, and enjoy security_. I felt lost, but it was all right. I found you again.”

Aziraphale was looking at him, Crowley could _sense_ it, and he refused to turn his head. If he had to see Aziraphale’s eyes in this second he would lose it completely. “Can we not?”

There was a painful pause, just for a moment. “Right. Of course, my dear. I’m sorry.” And then, in a very, very different voice, “Crowley!”

_That_ made Crowley look. Aziraphale was gripping the dashboard. There was an overwhelming smell of… pine in the car, pine and herbs. Aziraphale looked utterly horrified. “Aziraphale!”

“I’m being summoned!” His eyes were huge, his pupils completely blown.

“Heaven? Stay with me, put them off!”

"No, Earth! Crowley!” Aziraphale made as if to cling to Crowley. Then he disappeared, and the Bentley smashed into the car in front of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shin, dalot, yod spells out "Shaddai", one of the seven Names of God in Judaism; it means 'Almighty'.
> 
> It is also an acronym for _Shomer Daltot Yisrael_ , Guardian of the Doors of Israel, and is often written on mezuzot (or sometimes just the first letter, shin). The mezuzah is attached to the doorpost in Jewish homes (Deuteronomy 6:9: "Write the words of God on the gates and doorposts of your house") and also serves an apotropaic function.
> 
>  _V’hoshieinu l’ma-an sh’mecha_ \- Save us for Your name's sake, a line from the Hashkiveinu. In English, the lines that follow it say "Shield us from every enemy, plague, sword, famine, and sorrow. Remove the adversary from before and behind us. Shelter us in the shadow of Your wings." Like with the Shaddai, Aziraphale is asking God for protection.
> 
> The Tetragrammaton (Four Letters) is the name YHWH. Crowley and Aziraphale avoid saying it out of respect.
> 
> A genizah is a storage place where books or papers on which the name of God has been written can be kept safely before being properly buried. I don't know if the West Central Liberal has one, but it's the closest synagogue to Aziraphale's shop!
> 
> Maimonides was a Sephardic Jewish Rabbi, philosopher, physician, astronomer and all round polymath active in the second half of the 12th century. He and Aziraphale enjoyed drinking wine together, and Aziraphale has one of the first copies of the _Guide for the Perplexed_ , from when it was still in Judeo-Arabic.


	4. Mastic

Once, Crowley and Aziraphale had got drunk together in a _lovely_ little taverna in Thessaloniki. Raki to start, of course, and then a crisp white wine to go with the chicken cooked in olive oil and garlic and lemon, and the thick, crusty bread warm from the oven. To end, they were offered a digestif of mastiha, a honey sweet liquer that had tasted overwhelmingly of pine or cedar. They bought a bottle and drank it right there at the table. The owner, desperate to close up, happily sold them another bottle.

The Arrangement was still shiny new. Crowley took a swig from the bottle in the street, and made the fig at a woman who looked down at them in contempt.

Aziraphale saw a dog minding its own business and went to bother it. “Hello, doggy,” he said, bending over to stroke its head, and fell arse over tit into a bush when he missed. This alone made Crowley nearly sick with laughter, but when the angel climbed out of the bush, went to pet the dog _again_ and fell into the bush _again_ he had to sit down in the street, paralysed with mirth, in an apoplexy of laughter.

Shutters were beginning to be thrown open, so as soon as Crowley was able to he grabbed Aziraphale’s collar and dragged him to his lodgings around the corner. He had never _seen_ the angel so drunk, and in this state it was hardly a stretch of his manipulative talents to tempt him into starting on the second bottle with him.

At around three o’clock in the morning Crowley began to realise something was wrong. Usually when they drank they argued – not unkindly, but passionately, about some trivial little aspect of human existence – but tonight Aziraphale was unusually passive. Unusually suggestable. He didn’t argue at all. When Crowley told him to drink, he drank, arms jerking like he was a puppet. He stared without seeing. Crowley told him to sober up a bit; he snapped his fingers, and nothing happened. Tears started to run down his cheeks, and Aziraphale apparently didn’t notice them. Crowley spent a miracle on sobering him up himself, and getting rid of anything left in his stomach. But Aziraphale just… stopped moving.

He’d stopped moving, but his eyes were open, and he looked afraid.

Oh, fuck, I’ve only gone and killed him, Crowley had thought.

It was two days before Aziraphale had returned to normal. Crowley had sat with him the whole time, mostly complaining. Aziraphale was pale and shaky, and didn’t eat or drink a thing. When Crowley made some jibe about angels being unable to handle their alcohol, Aziraphale had shivered.

“It wasn’t the alcohol. It was the resin.” Then he had looked wide-eyed at Crowley, and his breathing was tight. He’d bolted without another word, leaving his beautifully embroidered coat, and Crowley didn’t see him again for seventeen years.

*

The woody smell of mastic was overwhelming, and terrifying.

Aziraphale took in the tableau through a haze that was somehow both leaden, and _screaming_. He was in what looked like a barn. There was a chalk summoning circle sketched around him, and tea lights flickered menacingly. To the side, out of his reach, was a censer from which a thick white smoke billowed.

Standing in front of him was a woman wearing a gas mask.

Aziraphale thought he might faint, and the words were forced out of him like vomit. “Why have you called upon the princes of the Eastern Altitude,” he said in a strange low voice, and he didn't know where the words came from, they were suddenly in his mouth like lumps of cyanide, and if he didn’t spit them out he instinctively knew he’d be in for a world of pain, “and what is your desire?”

“Huh. I really didn’t think that would work,” Naqamiel said, voice horribly distorted. Aziraphale knew he had to _getoutgetoutgetoutgetout._ He tried to bend over the touch the chalk circle, and his legs just folded beneath him. He felt sick to his non-essential stomach. “No,” he tried to say, but it felt like his tongue was on another planet. “No.”

“I haven’t asked you anything yet.” Naqamiel squatted in front of him.

“No.”

“No? The book says I should add some more incense.” Aziraphale nearly _was_ sick then, as she carefully spooned several tears into the censer. “There. Your report from Thessaloniki really was very useful, you know. Extremely important for us to know. And very dangerous if Hell had ever got to hear about it. Given our ethereal nature I guessed the incense would be more potent than a distillation. Heaven let me run a few tests. You’re happy to help Heaven, aren’t you?”

Aziraphale nodded. Somewhere in his mind he was raging, but his limbs felt so very heavy. Anything, another voice in his mind said. He’d do _anything_ to stop feeling like this. Anything.

“Good. Now. Let me see your wings.”

And they were out. The two of them. It was so hard to disobey – obeying felt like floating, and disobeying felt like being held in a vice. But beneath that more immediate concern was hatred, and the sick feeling of violation.

Naqamiel ran a hand down some of his primaries, and he shuddered. “I remember these. I remember…” _But if she can put her hand inside the circle_ , the more lucid part of his mind shouted at him, _maybe you can reach out. "_ You're the only one, you know. That's why it was public. We wanted to teach the others... But then none one else has been demoted since. So I've never had the chance to do it again."

"No," Aziraphale said. The word was like acid in his throat, like bile, or a red-hot lump of metal.

"No? Isn't it a pleasure, for another angel to touch your wings?" Naqamiel's hand was buried deep in his coverts, and suddenly she gripped a handful, and _pulled_. The jolt went right through him, up his wing and down his spine. Then he felt her fingers on his scars instead. "Is that better?"

"No!"

He was about to struggle, to hit her again with his wings. They were so heavy, but he might have enough for a single burst of energy. Then the small, sane voice in his head said that while Naqamiel was distracted by his wings - ****_by his lack of two wings_ \- he should pay attention to the circle instead. The mastic made his head swim, and the sick pleasure of Naqamiel's exploring hands made his stomach revolt. He slowly stretched out a hand towards the chalk, inch by inch, hoping to scuff some of it away. Naqamiel didn’t even look down; she just stamped the heel of her shoe down on his fingers, and Aziraphale didn’t have the strength to cry out.

“Now. What happened in your bookshop was a hiccough. I’m unhappy about it. But I can see to you and _then_ kill Crowley. The order doesn’t really make a difference to me. But I’ll tell you what. If you tell me how you survived the hellfire, I’ll make it quick for him.”

_Move!_ His mind screamed at him as he stared at his bloody hand. _Do something! You have to_ do _something!_

He wants to tell her. It would be so easy to tell her. Then he could just lie on the floor, and let the smoke and the heaviness overtake him…

And then Heaven would know what had happened. And Heaven would tell Hell. And Hell would kill Crowley.

“No…” He didn’t feel numb. He could feel everything. He could feel the dirt of the floor, and the smoke in his lungs. He felt _too much_. He felt dizzy, and raw, and very afraid. “No.”

“No? Is that all you can say.”

He swallowed painfully. Considered. “Fuck off,” he said, very clearly. He tumbled down onto his back in slow-motion, and looked up at the hideous gas mask. “No.”

“All right,” Naqamiel said. Aziraphale watched her walk away and pick up a battered, leather-bound book. Very nice binding, the bookseller in his head assessed, but visible damage. “And if thou rebel and thou be disobedient to mine will and will do not as I have commanded you,” she read. “I deprive you of all dignities and place upon you chains of fire and brimstone until thou be obedient.”

Aziraphale had trouble understanding her through the gas mask. He _thought_ she’d just said-

*

Crowley peeled his face out of the bonnet of the Bentley. He healed his back – thank _fuck_ it wasn’t his neck, that would have been an instant discorporation – and the shards of glass in his face began to pop out. There was a whole lot of boring screaming and sirens going on around him, which didn’t do anything for his headache. He _really_ didn’t have it in him to change everyone’s memories, so they’d just have to watch and live with it. The Bentley repaired itself under his shaking hands as he made his way around to the driver’s seat.

“Sir! Sir, you can’t- what are you _doing_?”

“Other driver?” he said.

“Me!” said one of the men on the pavement. He had been furious, and then horrified by the body that had smashed through the other car’s windscreen, and was now circling swiftly back around to fury again.

“Sorry,” Crowley said and reversed right through the police cordon tape.

*

Aziraphale was the one, strangely, who’d always been the expert on magic. Crowley couldn’t scry to save his life; that’s what the humans had invented Google for. If someone on Earth had kidnapped Aziraphale by summoning him, well, Crowley could just summon him right back. Both of them had had their fair share of inconvenient run-ins with Dee and Keeley and the rest of the weirdos, but rarely had any real harm been done. Most magicians had been so surprised by a ritual actually working that they forgot to even ask any questions. Crowley had usually given then a very nasty view of what would happen if they stayed on their current course, while Aziraphale found a long droning lecture worked well for him.

Crowley pulled grimoires from the bookshelves, with the horrible thought that he didn’t have a clue what he was looking for. He hadn’t even healed the Bentley’s poor windscreen, though he had made sure that the gazes of thieves and policemen alike would slide off it like water off a duck’s back, or suspicions off an Antichrist.

It was dark outside. Raining. And then a sound as clear as a bell cut through Crowley’s desperate ill-treatment of several irreplaceable 15th century grimoires: _tap, tap, tap._

Crowley slowly turned his head, and he knew _exactly_ who it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of mastic incense being used as an angel roofie comes from Ars Almadel, Book 4 of the Lesser Key of Solomon: "and as soon as the angell smells it he beginneth to speake with a low voice asking what your desier is and why you have called the princes and governers of his Altitude."
> 
> Naqamiel's punishment for naughty spirits is taken directly from the Oberon Grimoire, and isn't the worst or weirdest punishment for spirits in there by a country mile.


	5. Demotion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one has some rather more graphic violence in it, and includes amputation, extreme punishment, and public humiliation. I've put it in a separate chapter so that anyone who wishes to skip can do so.

Aziraphale wrung the hem of his white robe between his hands. The friendly serpent demon had never reappeared after being summoned Downstairs to report. Aziraphale had fixed the wall of Eden, and fretted. He had plonked himself down in the sand on the Eastern side, which he’d been told to guard, though the humans never came back. The sun went down, and the colours were very beautiful. Then the sky had become dark, and Aziraphale had watched the stars slowly, slowly, dance across the sky. They had been very beautiful too, but he’d been too lost and worried to fully appreciate them.

The next day, Uriel had descended like lightning, arrayed in glory and splendour, and told him his presence was required Upstairs.

“You can leave that outside,” Uriel said, outside the Judgement Theatre. Aziraphale had aggressively been strangling his himation since he realised their destination.

“Oh. Right, of course, sorry,” Aziaphale said. He closed his eyes, and stepped out of his body. It felt a bit nippy outside it. As his second pair of wings were pulled from the corporation its clothing disappeared. Behind him, there it stood, upright, blank-eyed. It looked odd, in a way he couldn’t quite place his finger on.

After Abel, he would be able to put a name to it.

It looked dead.

He shook out his mane, and lowered his heavy horned head, and stretched open his beak. He’d become used to that body very quickly, the warmth and solidity of it, but it was quite cramped for him.

Uriel opened the doors to the Judgement Theatre, and Aziraphale followed them in. It was a wide circle, with a bright light facing down. All around, stands rose up and up; first a circle of the seraphim, each one burning like a flame, six wings fluttering anxiously – then his own rank, all his own friends and colleagues, each with four wings, and four faces trained on him in concern and nervousness. Some were weeping softly, and _that_ was terrifying. And so on and so on they rose, all nine ranks assembled.

All looking at _him_.

Aziraphale glanced up around him, and even his eagle eyes could not see where it ended. It looked like the whole of Heaven was there.

As a cherub, Aziraphale had often been at the centre of Heaven, with all faces turned towards him. But all eyes had been on the Lord, and Aziraphale’s adoring gaze had been trained on Her. That had not been a nerve-wracking experience. It was bliss, to be one of millions of soulmates, all straining with love towards a single point.

But the Lord was nowhere to be seen, and _he_ was the centre of attention. It was… beyond horrifying. It was worse than the feeling of amputation that had come when the Rebels fell, screaming and clawing, or cursing and diving.

If he had been human he would have fainted, but angels were allowed no such mercy.

There stood the seven Archangels. Gabriel in the centre, flanked by Michael and Uriel. Sandalphon was sneering.

Only one non-Archangel stood in the arena with him. Naqamiel was regarding him with a beatific smile, and in her hand she held a sword.

Aziraphale’s knees nearly buckled. _God heals my courage,_ he reminded himself, _God heals my strength. God heals my courage, God heals my strength._

He looked at Gabriel, who sighed, and made a closed-mouth approximation of a smile.

“Well, this is a real pickle, Aziraphale,” he said. His voice easily carried up to the very highest stands. “We don’t rightly know what to do with you.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said. His ox’s head, always the first to betray him, was lowing in mournful fear. “I’m so sorry, I’ll never do it again, I promise.”

Gabriel held up a hand. “We know you're sorry. We do. But it doesn’t _quite_ cut it, does it?”

“I just thought-“

“You were not put on Earth to _think_ , Aziraphale!” Michael says sharply. “You were put on Earth to obey your orders! You’re a soldier!”

Aziraphale cringed. He had never felt like much of a soldier. As a cherub he had lead a platoon in the War, but he had taken a spear to the thigh early on. However, he definitely knew soldiers didn’t give away their weapons and lie to their commander-in-chief. All four of his faces trained their eyes on the ground in front of them.

“ _I_ think that you were neglectful, Aziraphale,” Gabriel continued. “I think you were foolish. I think you were being _silly_. Some of my kin think that perhaps there’s more to it than that. That perhaps you were asked by Hell to leave your post. That perhaps we have a mole.”

_This… isn’t about the sword?_ His human face showed his shock, but his lion’s head was roaring at the accusation. “I would _never_ \- I would never work for Hell, I would never throw my lot in with those- those- those rebels, those traitors, those murderers-“

“We don’t know, Aziraphale.” Gabriel spread his hands regretfully. “We have to let the Lord decide. We don’t _know_ if you’ve rebelled against Her. So. If the Lord judges that you have, you will Fall. We await Her Judgement.”

A one, ten million angels craned their necks Aziraphale closed his eyes, trembling to the end of every hair and feather as he waited for the _drop,_ for the helpless fall, for the burning.

The floor remained firm under his feet.

Gabriel clenched his fists in victory. He beamed. “Yes! The Lord doesn't want you to Fall! You remain a part of Us! Oh, I’m so relieved.”

“The verdict is stupidity, then, rather than sabotage,” Uriel said dryly.

“It is. But Aziraphale is as the Lord created him,” Gabriel said magnanimously.

“Still, Aziraphale, it's obvious that you can't be trusted with the duties of your current rank,” said Michael.

“I’m afraid I agree.” Gabriel looked genuinely contrite. “It’s not like it was before, you know. Before the War we might have been able to be more lenient. But we _are_ at war now, and I’m afraid that while we’re under martial law, I can’t see any way forward other than demotion.”

Three of Aziraphale’s faces frowned; his eagle face couldn’t, of course, but he tilted this head in visible confusion. There was a murmur all around, and Aziraphale knew that the rest of the Host was just as confused as to what this entailed as he was.

Aziraphale was shaking, and couldn’t stop. “I, I don’t understand,” his four mouths said.

Naqamiel circled him. Her sword was short, and wide. Aziraphale could not see the edge of the blade. It disappeared into nothingness.

“All ye angels, witness the sentence that awaits you if you fail in your God-given duty!” Michael said. “Aziraphale, you failed to protect the humans from the wiles of the demon Crawly, and the Tree of Knowledge from the humans. You shall no longer have dominion over the wild creatures.”

With a single stroke, Naqamiel cut off Aziraphale’s leonine head.

Ten million angels screamed – ten million and one, for Aziraphale screamed too. His human face, at least. His eagle’s face shrieked, and his ox’s face roared. He touched his hand to his neck, as courage and fierceness fell away from him. He could hear screaming and weeping and horror all above him.

On the floor, his lion’s head, with its white mane and golden eyes, lay. It was fur, and hair, and blood, and bone. His tongue lolled out from between his teeth; he could feel it still, he could feel that tongue, he could feel those teeth. But it was separate from him.

“You shall no longer have dominion over the beasts of the field,” Gabriel said, his voice carrying easily over the cacophony.

Another scream of shock climbed through the ranks of angels. Aziraphale stared at Gabriel in utter horror, shaking his three heads. “No, no! No, please!” Aziraphale cried out, falling to his knees.

He screamed again as Naqamiel cut his ox’s head off.

It thudded onto the floor, a white dead weight. There was so much blood. Already his head was scarlet with it. His open eyes were like onyx, a perfect jet blackness.

Strength bled out of him. He lay on the floor in utter shock, wings curled around him. With his human face he wept; with his eagle face he tried to bite out at Naqamiel.

There was now a dead silence in all the assembled ranks upon ranks of angels. The only small sounds in that vast expanse were Aziraphale’s sobs of terror and pain.

“You shall no longer,” Uriel said, quietly, “have dominion over the birds of the air.”

“No! Please! Please, I beg you, please! Please!”

Naqamiel reached down, and turned him onto his side, so she could sever his eagle’s face without cutting off his human one. Aziraphale looked up at her from the side, through his eagle’s eye. He could see everything on her face. The fierce joy on it.

And then he saw nothing. Naqamiel was behind him. He rolled over into the mess of gore and blood, and looked into his eagle’s face.

His eagle face and his human face had never seen each other. His feathers were white, and speckled with gold. He reached out, and touched them. For a second he was sure that he was Falling, but _no_. Instead, God was receding; he 'd never felt such distance from Her. He could not see Her, with his weak human eyes. He could not ascend to reach Her.

He was too low now to speak to Her. They had spoken together, several times. She had always given him a kind word, when he could not follow what the other cherubim were saying. She had laughed at his observations about Her creation. She had asked him what things he liked in it.

The last thing he'd said to Her had been a lie.

As he came back to his senses, he realised that the only sound in the whole vastness of Heaven was his own wail. It shuddered to an end, and Aziraphale stared up.

Ten million angels looked back at him.

Naqamiel flipped him over onto his face, and his human cheek and nose – his _only_ nose _–_ were smeared with his own blood. Naqamiel took one side, and Sandalphon the other; he was too faint to stand, so they hoisted him up between them. He vainly tried to shield the bloody stubs of his heads with one of his wings. They were already closing, turning into human shoulders, a human neck. He could feel his body shifting, his essence crying out in protest as his form changed to mimic the design of the lower angels.

“You failed in your charge to guard the Tree of Knowledge,” said Gabriel, “and to protect the humans from demonic wiles. Your new charge is to do what you so manifestly failed to do in the Garden. You will protect the humans in their new existence, and walk among them. They are now your only dominion. You are hence demoted to the rank of Principality.”

There was a fluttering sigh above him. He would later realise it was probably the other Principalities, offended that the disgraced ex-cherub would be lumped with them.

Gabriel spread his hand, and just like that, the blood and the hair and the three heads were gone. Like they had never existed. Like they were not a part of him. Aziraphale howled in grief. He tried to pull out of Naqamiel and Sandalphon’s grip, as though he could drag them back into existence again. But he was held fast.

“As a Principality, you have surrendered the dominions of the cherubim. You will now surrender the dignity of your former rank.”

He didn’t have the strength to speak. Dignity? What dignity? What dignity did he have left? What dignity had been left to him?

There was suddenly a saw in Michael’s hand. She held it out to Naqamiel, and then took her place in gripping Aziraphale’s arm. Uriel walked around behind him, and Aziraphale was dizzy with the realisation that he could only see in one direction now, he couldn’t see what was happening behind his new back. “What- what-?”

Suddenly two of his wings were wrenched back, and existence dropped away. Aziraphale realised what dignity Gabriel was referring to. For the very first time since his creation, he was naked.

“No!” he tried to shout. “Please!” he tried to beg. No sound emerged from his lips. His form already knew what his mind did not: that it was no use. There was nothing he could say, or do.

He could not stop the inevitable.

It did not stop him from struggling, as the saw was touched to the first wing joint. After that, the pain was too much. The entire cosmos was filled with it, and there was room for nothing else. Not sight, nor hearing, nor thought. Blood ran down his back, over his buttocks, down his thighs.

When it was over, he was dropped to the floor. He curled on his side. There was blood everywhere again, and feathers. He felt _cold_ for the first time, and for thousands of years chilly nights would always remind him of this moment.

In front of him, they placed his two severed wings.

He ran his shaking hand over them. He had never seen his own wings like this, of course. He didn’t realise how pearlescent his coverts were. Or had been. Now they were sticky with clotted blood.

He could barely move from the shock and the pain, but he pulled them towards himself and cradled them. He wanted to hold them for as long as he could. As though if he could hold them for long enough, perhaps, perhaps…

But Gabriel stretched out his hand again, and the feathers and blood vanished again, and his wings, his beautiful wings, were transformed into a long shift of rough white linen. “It will fade away, and fall into nothingness,” Gabriel said. “Like the bodies of the humans will, due to _your_ failure.”

Gabriel looked up at the ranks of angels. Aziraphale kept his eyes fixed on Naqamiel’s bare feet. Gabriel’s voice felt infinitely far above him.

“Let this be a lesson to you all: we’re at war now, and there’s no room for mistakes! You all have your assigned duties. Dismissed!”

There was a rising hum, like a hive of bees. Bees, Aziraphale thought, feeling very far away. He had followed a bee, in the Garden, right back to her hive, and he had heard them then…

Gabriel nudged his shoulder with his toe, pushing him onto his back. His upper wings – his only wings, his _only wings_ – were squashed beneath him. With a gargantuan effort, Aziraphale looked up at the other angels.

“All right,” Gabriel said, with an apologetic smile. “Now, that was unpleasant for all of us, I know. But you need to get up, get back in your body, and get back to work, Aziraphale. Can’t lie around feeling sorry for ourselves forever, can we?”

Aziraphale slowly moved his human head – his only head – his _head_ to the left, and then the right. His mouth was moving without sound.

“That’s the spirit! I trust you’ve learnt an _important lesson_ about _vigilance_. Don’t let it happen again, hm?” He made a moue of concern. “If you fail again, I don’t think we’ll be able to be so merciful.”

Aziraphale made some kind of movement. He didn’t know what it was.

“Great! Right, Michael, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that latest re: Belial…”

The archangels moved away. Aziraphale lay on the floor, looking up. For a long time, at least to him, Naqamiel loomed, staring down at him.

She was not looking into his eyes. Her gaze raked over his new form. Occasionally she gave a little nod of satisfaction, or tilted her head to the side.

Then, without a word, she too wandered away. And Aziraphale was alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See Ezekiel 1:5-11 for a detailed description of the cherubim. The important thing is that they have four wings, as discussed in Chapter 1, and four heads: those of a human, of a lion, of an ox, and of an eagle. As for Aziraphale's name:
> 
> 'Az (or 'Oz) = strength, might, power, courage (from עזז, 'azaz, to be strong)
> 
> -i = possessive suffix
> 
> Raphael = 'It is God who heals', 'God Heals', 'God, Please Heal'


	6. Confrontation

The first thing Crowley did was check that the illusion of silver held on the incantation bowls. The bitumen was still there. The magnet clasp of the handbag clicked closed, and he held it at his side in his left hand. With his right, he pulled the heavy gun from the back of his trousers. It was blunt and unfamiliar.

The last time he’d fired a gun it had been a bolt-action rifle. He’d gained something of a reputation for himself in the Second World War for never carrying a gun. He had thought it was inefficient. He wasn’t a particularly brilliant marksman (when physics and Crowley’s Idea Of What Should Happen reached an impasse, reality tended to side with the latter, but it wasn’t an argument he enjoyed having in the heat of the moment), and a gun just introduced another weapon into the mess for someone else to use. Crowley preferred to _be_ the weapon. It simplified matters.

Right now, he did _not_ want matters to be simplified. Simplified, this very swiftly became a brutal fight which he would lose. He wanted this situation to be very, very complicated. _What could have made her peaceful with a mind that fucking psychopathy made simple as a fire?_ Complexity, subtlety, nuance – these were famously not angels’ strong points (one angel excepted, and even he could be as dense as the chocolate cake he favoured), and Crowley reckoned the more balls he could keep in the air at any one time, the better the chance of Naqamiel making a mistake.

So he held out the handgun, standing across the bookshop from the front doors, and opened them with a word.

The rain was like a solid object, the opaque grey curtain backing the small stage of the bookshop’s portico. In front of it, perfectly dry, stood Naqamiel. She stepped forwards, and stopped. A look of slow astonishment dawned on her face, swiftly followed by an inhuman fury. She looked up at the lintel.

“Looking for this?” Crowley held up the bag, and her eyes snapped down again. Her eyes were the same yellow-gold as his, but her pupils are round. Fucking eagles, Crowley thought. Every snakey instinct in him was telling him to hide, to get out of sight. But he needed to find Aziraphale. He was still on earth, Crowley could feel him. He just couldn’t _find_ him. “Must be important, for you to come back for it.”

Naqamiel took a step to the right, then two to the left. Her eyes didn’t leave Crowley’s, and she didn’t blink. Crowley recognised the tension of a coiled spring. “Hand it over, demon, and I’ll make it quick for you.”

“Tell me where Aziraphale is, and I’ll think about it,” Crowley said. He had one eye closed, and one looking down the barrel of the handgun.

Naqamiel didn’t answer, just looked up to the lintel. The way she paced back and forth under the lintel made Crowley think of a tiger at the zoo. “Your work?”

“Of course not. Aziraphale’s. And Hers, of course. Guardian of the doors of Israel.” Naqamiel _snarled_ at him, and Crowley beamed back sweetly. “She must still like him after all. I mean, if you couldn’t tell that when he exorcised you. Where is he?”

“You don’t intimidate me, demon Crowley. You don’t amuse me.”

Crowley made a mocking face at her. “Ah, well. Can't please everyone. Thanks to Her, we’re at an impasse, so. Tell me where Aziraphale is, and you can take your bag and go back up to Heaven. We’ll call it a day. Hanging around an angel’s made me merciful.”

“And being around you has made him dull. He’s made you weak, and you’ve made him _weaker_. I didn’t think it was possible. He was an idiot and a coward when I knew him. But there’s always further to Fall, isn’t there?”

Crowley’s hand was cramping around the gun. It looked much easier in the films. “And yet he _hasn’t_ , has he?”

“God obviously thinks he can be brought back to the fold. I’m here to remove your pernicious influence as quickly as possible, and then I shall have all the time with Aziraphale I need.”

Crowley bit the inside of his cheek, and the alarm bells in his head rang even louder. “You don’t want to kill him?”

Naqamiel looked disconcerted, and for a second Crowley thought his barb had landed. “Of course I don’t want to _kill Aziraphale_. As you said. He’s not Fallen. God thinks he is redeemable. I will help him. I’ll let him _atone_.”

“Atone?”

“Atone. To be at one with the rest of Us. When everything that he holds between himself and Us has been stripped away.”

“Like me.”

“Like you. To begin with. Heaven will give me a carte blanche, and all the time I need. There’s no need to rush this time. All those parts of him that make him weak and disobedient and sinful can be removed, piece by piece.”

_All the parts of him that made him fun, and interesting, and independent and clever and compassionate,_ Crowley’s mind supplied. He couldn’t let Naqamiel return to Heaven, he was beginning to realise. The fire in her eyes would not be quenched; it would only burn hotter and hotter.

Then he realised that she was still talking. “And that’s why I need time. I can be more precise. Especially now that I have seen how well the mastic incense works. I asked him to open his wings and he simply obeyed.”

The sight of the gun was bouncing up and down; Crowley hissed out his breath, and forced himself to be still. Naqamiel was still pacing. He had to keep his mind on her. Not on the image of Aziraphale drugged and helpless.

“Last time he was able to struggle. He moved around. It wasn’t my best work. When I sawed off his wings-“

A whole new vista of horror was suddenly visible to him. “That was you?” he said quietly. He wanted it confirmed, because he was going to kill her. He wasn’t just going to rescue Aziraphale. He was going to make sure this rabid bitch never harmed a hair on his head again.

“Of course,” Naqamiel said, not ashamed in the least. “And his heads.”

“His _… heads._ ”

“He was a cherub,” Naqamiel said, as though explaining it to a child. “He had four heads. I cut off three of them, when he was demoted. In all your fraternisation, did you never notice that he only had one head?”

Crowley did not see red. He didn’t see anything at all. He was blind and deaf and dumb with rage. And when it cleared, she had the sheer gall to be smiling at him.

“Though, now I think of it, why would he allow you to know such a thing? I certainly wouldn’t, if I had so disgraced myself in front of all the choirs of Heaven. He cried. He screamed. He begged. It was very… messy.”

“You’re a fucking sick one, you know that?” Crowley said, baring his own teeth. “Bet they love you up there. Bet you fit right in.”

“Oh, no. They all look away from me.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Crowley said through gritted teeth.

“There is no need to imagine, demon Crowley. They fear me, as they should. I am God's Wrath. I am God's Punishment. I am God's Vengeance.”

“Yeah, I know Hebrew too,” Crowley said.

“Do you? Good. _Y’hi mayim_.” Suddenly in her left hand there was a full glass of clear water, and Crowley stepped back. Naqamiel’s smile widened. “I thought so. I knew it was a trick. I’ll find out, you know.”

“Er, nope. Haven’t you heard? I’m immune.”

“I had heard. And yet you stepped back. And yet chains of fire and brimstone are burning Aziraphale, even though they're not even made of true hellfire. He should be immune to that, shouldn’t he? One of you will tell me how you both survived, sooner or later.”

“It’s different tech.” The _bitch_. The fucking sadistic, sociopathic _fucker_. “We need dark magic to keep the demons in line too, remember?”

“Ah. So it just burns him, without obliterating him. Thank you, Crowley.” She swirled the water around the glass. Round and round and round. “Unfortunately for you, this is very much the real deal.”

“Hope you’ve got good aim,” Crowley said, and a voice in the back of his head reminded him that _she almost certainly did_.

“I do,” Naqamiel echoed. “Not that I need it.” She held out her right hand, and lightning shot upwards. The lintel exploded.

“Oh, _shit_ ,” Crowley shouted, skidding backwards. “What the _fuck_?”

Naqamiel strode across the threshold and did not stop. “Give me the bag, demon, and I’ll make it quick.”

“You’re an _angel_ , you can’t just- just do _that_ to the Name!”

“The ends justify the means,” Naqamiel said. “She will forgive me. Put down the gun.”

And then the plan was right there in his head, fully formed. The only way he was going to find Aziraphale was if Naqamiel took him to him. And there, in her handbag, were two incantation bowls. If he was discorporated, they’d suck him right in.

Or if he was small enough for his body to fit inside too.

If he were to shrink fast enough he could look like he’s disappeared.

Aziraphale had better be right that both bowls have been compromised, or he was going to have a very, _very_ long eternity. And Aziraphale…

“Hmm. No,” Crowley said, and dropped the handbag at his feet. “I see your _y’hi mayim_ , and I raise you a _y’hi ashan_.”

Instantly the whole bookshop was full of smoke; black and choking, with an edge of sulphur.

Crowley really hoped that Aziraphale would be able to tell him off for it later.

The holy water cut through the smoke like a knife, and it didn’t take any degree of Oscar-winning talent to make Crowley scream, but it went right over his head. He was the size of a child, of an orange, a grape, an ant, smaller and smaller, and as he did the magic of the snake bowl gained more and more power over him. Naqamiel coughed and thundered overhead, and the nearest incantation bowl sucked Crowley in like a vacuum sucking up a spider.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y’hi mayim - Let there be water
> 
> Y’hi ashan - Let there be smoke


	7. Grief

Naqamiel flew over London. She was through the clouds now, and the air above them was icy and bright. Underneath her arm she held her handbag.

She didn’t need the gun or the incantation bowls anymore. She had checked that they were still in the handbag, along with the bitumen. The idiotic demon probably hadn’t even realised what he was holding. For a moment she had considered incinerating the lot.

But she brought out one of the silver bowls, and the Name had gleamed in the warm light of Aziraphale’s bookshop. She had done what she’d had to with the lintel, but she ought not to push the Almighty’s forgiveness too far. She’d return the bowls to Heaven, once she had done what she needed to do to Aziraphale down on Earth. Could hardly rely on the mastic Upstairs, after all.

In the other bowl, inside the silk-lined calf-leather handbag, Crowley shivered and bit his tongue to stop himself from swearing. It was different when you were flying _yourself_ , obviously, because you were getting plenty of exercise in. And sitting inside a silver bowl didn’t help matters; the thing was being coated in frost, for – for fuck’s sake.

Aziraphale, the clever, clever bastard, had been right about the incantation bowl.

It had sucked him in all right, and round and round he’d gone. But for every circle round he’d been bumped out again. The letters which Aziraphale had scratched out had the effect of large rocks being placed inside a maelstrom – all the magical currents had been calmed, unable to gather enough power to make him drown. He sat on top of one of these scratched-out letters, shivering and _furious_ , but alive. Free.

He had no idea where they were when he felt Naqamiel begin to descend. In truth, his first several thoughts had been relief that he could defrost himself again. There was no sound of cars, though that didn’t mean much given the force of the rain. It didn’t touch Naqamiel, of course, but it cocooned around them.

Only one sound cut through it. A low moan.

Crowley clung to the bowl as Naqamiel dropped the handbag on the ground. He scooted out before either of the bowls could tip over and give him trouble, but at this size the open ground was the length of a football pitch away. He made himself an inch tall, and carefully sneaked out.

They were in a farm building of some kind. No animals, and a concrete floor. Storage. The air was thick with molecules – one of the disadvantages of being so small was that _everything_ else became so much bigger. Including odorants. It was a good thing Crowley didn’t need to breathe, or he’d suffocate on them. But he didn’t need to be able to smell to know what was in the censer.

Naqamiel had put a gas mask on and was heating a new charcoal over a candle. She placed it in the censer and poured tears of resin onto it. The smoke began to puff thick and white again.

Behind her, Aziraphale lay on the ground. His wings were out, and splayed painfully beneath him; there were patches of blood red, and black where the fire had burnt the feathers they touched. He was wearing only the barest few tatters of beige and sky-blue; the rest of his clothes had been burnt away. He was wrapped in chains that were glowing a dull red, and he was making a sound like a death rattle.

“Oh, no,” Naqamiel said. Crowley watched her scuff out something on the floor with the toe of her boot – must be the summoning circle – and step inside. She stood over Aziraphale, then bent down to touch his heart. “I release you from your chains. We’re just getting started.”

Crowley heard the strangled gasp as life and pain came back to Aziraphale. He saw his eyes snap open, and he saw the angel go utterly rigid in terror. Rage gathered strength inside him, and he held it back like a dam, letting the pressure of his fury and his hatred build, build, build. He knelt down, and he turned the pressure into words. Into a desire, into a _demand_. Aziraphale could still call on the Name of God to protect the bookshop, but Crowley was not going to call up to God. He was going to call down to the hellfire.

He placed his hands flat on the ground.

And deep, _deep_ below him, the fire heard his call, and surged to answer it.

*

The reason demons don’t go around burning people in hellfire left, right, and centre is because _true_ hellfire, the real angel-killing deal, can’t be summoned instantaneously. It has to come up from the Lake of Fire at the very centre of the Earth’s core to its surface. This is an average distance of around 6,371 kilometres (or 3,959 miles if you’re an American. Commiserations). Were the hellfire to travel up through the Earth at the speed of sound, a summoning would take about 18,574 seconds; just over five hours.

Luckily for Crowley and Aziraphale, hellfire travels much, much faster than that. It loves to burn flesh, and it _really_ loves to burn angels.

Hellfire, if summoned by a powerful enough demon, travels through the planet at about the speed at which a shuttle re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. Let’s say 30,000 kilometres per hour (18,641 and a splash miles per hour, for the Americans). This is 8 and a third kilometres, or just over five miles, every second. And Crowley would have to pray that no one halted the hellfire’s ascent as he focused all his power, without stopping, for just under 765 seconds.

That is, a little less than 13 minutes.

*

As far as healings went it was a painful one. Flesh was forced together with no gentleness, molecules of skin twisted back to their original alignment. The the most immediate layer of agony was wrung out of him like bloody water from a cloth, and in the relief he closed his eyes. How blessed it would be to return to that cool, dark place…

Beside him Naqamiel had scuffed out some of the chalk on the floor, and Aziraphale felt the world pouring through the gap to him. He could have moved, had he the energy; he tried to move his fingers, but he was still deadened by the mastic incense. The air was thick with it. He breathed, and tried to think. _Crowley…?_

He must have said it out loud, because Naqamiel gave him a sharp strike to his sternum. He choked on his breath and opened his eyes.

She’d broken the circle so that she could stand over him, staring down. He was reminded forcibly of the Judgement Theatre, as was probably her intention. He felt cold too, and with a glance at his shoulder he realised his clothes had all been burnt off him. She had not bothered to heal his wings, only his mortal body, so that he couldn’t escape by dying.

Stupid. Where would he escape to in death?

Naqamiel bent over towards him. “I’ve just come from your bookshop, Aziraphale. The demon was there. I don’t know how he was able to pass under the lintel.”

Aziraphale tilted his head. Had she seen Crowley and come back? Thank God he was safe in the bookshop. Thank God. “ _The name of the Lord is a strong tower_ ,” he slurred softly, drunkenly, “ _the righteous run into it and are safe_. You know that…”

“The _righteous_?” She bared her teeth in what could not be called a smile. “Ah. That would explain why I was able to walk inside. And why he wasn’t safe in there.”

Aziraphale blinked, and icy horror covered him like a wave. He struggled desperately against the mastic to think. “What…?”

“God didn’t appreciate Her name being used in such blasphemy. I walked right in, and I threw holy water over him.”

Aziraphale’s world fell away from him.

Naqamiel watched his expression, and grinned. “I _knew_ it. I knew he wasn’t immune. I knew it was a trick that you two had played. You found some spell, some… You’re not immune to hellfire either. You _will_ tell me.”

“Crowley…” Horror gave him energy, and cut right through the mastic smoke. “No, no, no no nononono-“

“Oh, _yes_. And he melted until there was nothing left of him. He screamed, just once. Not like you. I remember every one of your screams.”

Aziraphale believed her. There was absolute sincerity in her voice, and the mastic rendered him unable to differentiate between what Naqamiel thought was the truth and the _truth_. He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. What was there to say? He had thought nothing could eclipse the pain of the Judgement Theatre, or the panic when Satan had torn up the earth beneath them, or the cold terror of knowing that he and Crowley would be executed.

He’d been an idiot.

The grief was overwhelming. The loss of his heads and of his wings was nothing in comparison to it. This was the loss of _everything_ : the loss of sight, and hope, and laughter, and safety, and joy, and relief and kindness and peace and _love_ , this was the very end of love. He made a noise like a mortally wounded animal, a desperate, keening sound that rose, and rose, and deepened in his chest like a twisting sword.

Naqamiel squatted over him, and stroked her hand down his throat. He tried to lift his hand to strike her; she caught it easily. “It’s just us, now. No distractions. It’s all right, Aziraphale. I’ll help you come back to yourself. And then you can come back to Heaven. Isn’t that what you want?”

The mastic made it so easy to tell the truth. “No,” Aziraphale sobbed.

“Do you want to Fall? To go to Hell?”

“No!”

“Then what, Aziraphale? You can’t remain on Earth.” Her golden eyes bored into him, and even without the mastic he would never have been able to lie. “Tell me what you want.”

He wailed, and it didn’t sound human, or celestial, or infernal. He was beyond all of that now. “I want to die!”

Naqamiel went very still. “You want to _what_?”

“You killed Crowley.” In his mind, vivid from the incense, his desperate searching after his discorporation, when he had found Crowley – Crowley drunk, and devastated, with no plans to help stop the apocalypse, or to flee to Alpha Centuri. Just to drink for his final few hours, and then die.

_I lost my best friend._

“I killed a demon, and you want to die? You _filth_ ,” Naqamiel snarled. Her chest was heaving with her rage; Aziraphale saw it as though from the bottom of a well, with the incense swirling around them. “How could you be so _disgusting_?” She shook her head, and the gas mask was a terrifying distorted thing, like a monstrous bull. “You won’t get your wish. I won’t let them kill you. I won’t let you get a single thing you want. You’re _mine_ , and I _will not stop_ until you thank me for killing that demon. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale whispered. This hurt so _muc_ h more than losing his heads and his wings. He had not thought he could survive that punishment, but he had. He had survived. And on Earth he had thrived. He and Crowley had thrived. “I deserve it.”

“For your treachery?” Naqamiel spat. “For your _sins_?”

Aziraphale shook his head, his only head. “No. For hurting him. I took so long to realise, and then there was no time, and then I was too cowardly… And now it’s all too late. All my fault. There’s nothing you can do to make me feel more pain, Naqamiel. My sister…”

“I am not your sister! I am an angel of the Lord, and you are _scum_.” He had never seen her angry before. It was… pitiable. It was always her ruthless precision and her complete lack of compassion which had made her so terrifying. To see her undone by this simple feeling, to see her lack of comprehension of the profundity of his grief… He felt only pity. A light wash of it, and then he closed his eyes again. He would welcome the chains of fire.

This is what he had felt, on that bus from Tadfield, with Crowley asleep against his shoulder. The relief of hopelessness. Nothing more to think and fret and worry about. Then it had been Falling or dying that he was terrified of. He had been scared enough to weep, to sweat blood over it. How many days ago – five? Six? And now the worst had happened: Crowley had died, and he had not. He knew, now. The last final shred of his innocence had been ripped away, and he saw everything so clearly. The mastic had stripped away everything but cruel truth.

He understood Crowley’s impulse. He couldn’t drink, but he was already far more gone than most alcohol could bring him. Mastic swam in his lungs, in his head, and he was drowning in it. Would that he could. Crowley had known he had a few hours to endure. God knew how long Aziraphale would have to endure. But Crowley had been right, and Aziraphale had been wrong. Crowley had offered love, and Aziraphale had rejected it. He deserved far more suffering than Crowley did. His brave, kind, clever love.

“You are the Wrath of God, sister. Her wrath contains mercy. Please. If anyone knows a way to kill me, you do.”

In answer she gave him a strong blow to the abdomen. When he had some breath again he laughed. Even to his own ears, it sounded insane. “It’s ironic, that of all the angels in the universe, you’re the one who doesn’t know pain like this. Could never know it... It’s so much worse than when you cut off my heads. So much worse than sawing through my wings. They were… They weren’t _within_ me. There weren’t at the very core of me. That’s a place you can never go to, because there’s no way to force your way in. Like a fortified tower that can’t be taken by siege. Like the name of the Lord. I was standing on the parapet and I didn’t even realise…”

She bent down, and pressed her sharp fingernails into his chest. Though the visor of the gas mask he could see her wide and furious eyes.

“It was so gradual that I didn’t even know what my own heart was saying to me. It wasn’t loud enough to drown out my head. Like Her – the still small voice. The insistent whisper. I don’t know when… When someone said the word ‘love’, I don’t know when I started thinking about Crowley before the Host. Crowley even before God. Idolatry, isn’t it? There’s another sin for your list.” The mastic was a kind friend now, numbing the pain of his body and breaking his heart into tears, because he was speaking only truth.

“I have never heard,” Naqamiel said slowly, in contemptuous rage, “such disgusting, disgraceful-“

“No, no. Not disgraceful. Full of Grace. Full of love. We’re not _mirrors_ , Naqamiel. God doesn’t need a mirror. She doesn’t need ten million mirrors. She’s not vain. We’re… we’re crystals. Prisms. I was meant to disperse Her love into a million colours and throw them out. So they can see Her love in the colour kindest to their eyes…”

“It’s finally happened,” Naqamiel said, somehow combining awe and contempt. “You’ve finally cracked.”

“A cracked prism. Yes. Maybe. And you… You. You’re a convex glass, sister. You focus all that love into heat until the object of your focus burns. But you don’t keep any of it for yourself. That’s what I learnt. Perhaps it wasn’t wrong, to keep some of that love. We’re Her creations too. And to love _particular_ things. Have you ever spoken to an artist, Naqamiel? They want you to love _details_ , they want you to find some- some small _thing_ which speaks to _you_. She used to ask me what particular things I liked.”

And where had he learnt it? Drinking with Crowley, eating with Crowley, talking to Crowley… Teasing each other, prodding and poking and soothing. Saving. He had loved Crowley for the good in him. But Crowley said… he said he had loved him for the bad in him. _Just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing._

To love someone for their goodness was easy, but to love someone for their darkness, oh, that was a flood of light in and of itself. And in return Aziraphale had begun to fall in love with Crowley’s darkness too – his childish vindictiveness, his delight in mischief, his sulking, his boldness, his _brazenness_ , the jealousy that should _not_ have made Aziraphale feel wanted and cherished, his entertaining dislikes, his protective fury.

No one had ever loved him for the things he’d done _wrong_. He had thought that no one but God could see his mistakes and love him anyway.

“Gabriel didn’t understand. But I do now. Loving what humans make… She made _them._ I can love what She made and I can love what humans made. It’s all _light_ , in the end – light reflecting and refracting and dispersing and concentrating again. Light everywhere. She’s not vain but She _is_ an artist, She wants to know what we like. I like sushi, and I like opera, and Regency silver snuffboxes, and the clever, decorative little things that don’t need to be beautiful but are. I like gold and I like tea, I like Pu’erh and Earl Grey and Genmaicha and Darjeeling and Lapsang Souchong. I like butter and curries and rare steaks and chips, I _do_ like chips, I like salt, I like gravlax, I like chocolate, I like cream, I like cake and biscuits, I like red wine and white wine and green wine and brown wine and sparkling wine, I like that the most. I like flowers, and bees. I like the sky and the stars and running water and smooth stones. I like _dancing_. And I loved Crowley. And he was Her creation too, and you killed him.” The wave of grief crashed over his head again, and all the words were washed away. “Oh, God. Oh, God, Crowley!”

“He stopped being Her creation the second he Fell!”

“No. No! He was still what She made him, just in another place. Another shape, some of them. Shattered glass, just wanting to hurt. Not Crowley, though. He was… he was _beautiful._ Have you… have you ever been on a sailing ship, Naqamiel? Of course not, but… but you couldn’t have candles, or oil. Cause a fire. So you embed glass prisms in the wood. In the deck. And they catch the light, and refract in, and then there’s light below deck too. Not much, but enough to begin to see by. Enough to perhaps… Maybe that’s what Crowley was, and you destroyed him!”

He looked up through the gas mask at Naqamiel’s twisted face, and knew he’d find no mercy there. He looked through her, through the roof, through the sky itself, as though he had his eagle’s eyes again. “Lord, in your holy Name…” he slurred. If God had any mercy left for him, perhaps She would strike him dead Herself.

Naqamiel brought her heel down right on his face, and he felt his nose break. Just like Crowley’s, that first day East of Eden. He chuckled through a bubbling of blood at the dark irony of it, and Naqamiel roared in fury. “I deprive you of all dignities,” Aziraphale laughed again, and his tears washed some of the blood from his eyes, “and place upon you chains of fire and brimstone until thou be obedient!”

It was the burning agony again, and Aziraphale welcomed it. It spread across him, red-hot, and all conscious thought was forced from his mind. He couldn’t move, and he didn’t try to. He just surrendered. 


	8. Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gore (especially burns) and vomit mentioned in this one!

_Aziraphale loved him._

Two minutes left.

_Aziraphale loved him._

Naqamiel’s spell and the chains would die with her – he wasn’t a magic expert by any stretch of the imagination, but he knew that the death of the magician would break any open spells.

_Aziraphale loved him_.

But he couldn’t give her warning. Surprise and hellfire were the only two weapons left to him.

One minute and forty-five seconds.

Crowley’s hands were shaking with the effort of calling the hellfire. Aziraphale had passed out. Naqamiel wrapped her hand in her coat to briefly touch his neck, under his jaw; Crowley didn’t know why, but he had seen Aziraphale do it too, to wake someone who had fainted or passed out. It woke Aziraphale up too, and he cried out.

Naqamiel snapped her fingers: the chains vanished again, but she didn’t heal his body this time. “Tell me, Aziraphale. You _will_ tell me. How did you survive the hellfire?”

“I trusted Crowley,” Aziraphale’s voice usually went higher and broke when he was distressed or exhausted; now it was lower, lower than Crowley had ever heard it. It had the timbre of heavy furniture being pushed across a wooden floor too weak to hold it, and he realised it must be the mastic forcing the words out. “I trusted Crowley. Crowley knew what to do.”

Even now, Crowley thought, even now he was trying to hide it from her. If he thought Crowley was dead there was no reason to protect him anymore; this was pure stubbornness, pure spite, and Crowley’s whole body ached with love. It was pure _Aziraphale_ , hiding in plain sight behind his words, even though he must be mad with pain. Just enough plausible deniability, recounting facts while refusing to tell the truth, answering a different question.

One minute.

Naqamiel snapped her fingers, and the chains were back. She stood beside Aziraphale, watching. Crowley had to get her away, or the flames would jump to Aziraphale too. He began to grow, slowly, _slowly_ ; as soon as Naqamiel saw him the game would be up. With every inch he took a step backwards; when he was the size of a toddler again, he picked up one of the incantation bowls, the one from which Aziraphale had cut the Name of God.

The strain of changing his form, making himself silent, all while calling Hellfire from the bowels of the Earth, made a mallet hammer at his temples, made the cords of his neck and his calves and his arms cramp. If his eyes had been human, they would have been red instead of yellow. He was almost distracted by the taste of blood on his lips – his nose had started to bleed, he would later realise.

But Aziraphale was silent again, and he had run out of time. Twenty seconds still on the clock.

“Oi!” he shouted as he reached his final few inches of growth, and lobbed the silver bowl at her head. He grinned when it hit her, right on the back of the skull, and she turned. His teeth were bared and outlined in the blood that was all over his jaw, dripping from his chin. “We’re not done.”

Behind the visor of the gas mask, Naqamiel was beginning to glow. She brought her hand down to her side, and just like that, it held a long, _long_ sword. Crowley couldn’t see the edge of it.

Ten seconds.

Ten seconds doesn’t sound like a very long time. When the Wrath of God is bearing down on you with a longsword, it is the longest experience of your life, and in almost all cases, the last.

Crowley was determined to be the exception. He ran backwards through the barn, out the doors, into the night and the rain. He held both hands splayed out over the ground, muscles hard as iron, but he could feel the unholy destructive glee of it follow him.

Naqamiel raised her sword, eyes glowing like twin stars, and Crowley raised his hands.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t make any sound at all. The light of the twin stars flickered for a moment behind the gas mask, so she must have blinked. But the only sound was the roar of the hellfire, and the rain.

When the flames sank down again Crowley sank to his knees with them. His head was spinning, and for a long moment he just stared at the ground in exhaustion.

The buzzing in his ears faded. His vision was still flickering in black and white as his human body tried to faint; Crowley didn’t let it. He forced the faintness to turn into bile instead, and vomited.

Every muscle in his body ached.

He stood up and staggered back into the barn. He spat blood from his mouth, and as he finally breathed again he unwillingly scented the air. He was assaulted by it, under the familiar taste of his own blood: the woody, pine-like scent of mastic, almost overwhelming everything else. Sulphur. The iron-smell of hot metal and blood. The acridity of burning hair and burning feathers. And under all that, the mouth-watering smell of roast pork.

The chains were gone, and Aziraphale was very still.

His legs screamed in protest as he tried to run, buckling beneath him; he fell beside the circle, and… and nothing. He had nothing. He was spent.

He didn’t have the energy to roar. He could only look upwards and snarl. “Very funny! Very _fucking_ funny! Shit!” He pressed his hand to one of those awful blisters on Aziraphale’s soft abdomen: dark red and pus yellow, curls of scabbed skin charred with black, all edged in bright pink. The skin came away on his hand, sending clear liquid over him, and the _wetness_ undid him.

“ _Save Your servant, who trusts in You_! Fuck You! FUCK YOU!” His chest heaved in rage. Fire, fire, fire, always the _fucking fire_. “He’s the only decent one and you let her do this to him! You let them all fucking do this to _us_! I _hate You_!”

It wasn’t his demonic power that came to him, or any strength from God. He had long given up hoping for answers from Her. But his human body, doing all it knew how to do, answered his rage with new adrenaline, and Aziraphale took a painful, strangled breath. Crowley grabbed every last thread of his willpower and _poured_ it from his hands, trying to heal the cracked and blistered and peeling flesh, the melted fat, the cooked muscles. Naqamiel must have done this. Magic then miracle, magic then miracle. Just enough to prevent Aziraphale’s body from dying. He just needed enough to stop…

When he woke up it was light.

It was like the worst hangover you’ve ever had bar the one that finally killed you. Crowley forced his eyes open. Outside, the sky was the bright blue and white of mid-morning. With sick dread, he turned his head.

The burns were closed – not healed, but closed. Aziraphale’s skin was pale and clammy, and his eyelashes fluttered.

It was the second best thing Crowley had ever seen, after that vision in the bar at the end of the world. Aziraphale’s body was alive, which meant he had a chance to keep him on Earth, away from Heaven’s grasp.

He pushed himself up. Every bone creaked. He placed his hands on Aziraphale’s body; he had the energy to heal again. There was nothing he could do for the angel’s wings, not here, but the human body, that he could work with.

He nearly wept when Aziraphale finally took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “Hey! Hi. You’re all right, you’re all right, you’re all right,” Crowley chanted, apparently only for his benefit, because Aziraphale didn’t respond at all. He just looked up at the roof with those dead, blank eyes. “Aziraphale? Angel, _please_. Please please please just look at me.”

Aziraphale blinked, and he slowly, _slowly_ turned his head. “… Crowley…?”

He gritted his teeth and nodded. “Yes! Yes, it’s me, look!” Crowley said, and his sunglasses vanished. The light was like daggers in his eyes, but he smiled with them for Aziraphale. “See? It’s me. _It’s me_. She’s gone, she’s dead, properly dead.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes, and his brow creased in a frown. He tried to move, and gave up. “No. She said- _she said_ \- “ His mouth was twisting.

“Doesn’t matter what she said.” Crowley reached out and took Aziraphale’s hand. “See? She was an idiot. Never even checked. I’m fine.”

Aziraphale opened his eyes again. He looked at Crowley. And his whole face crumpled. “Crowley…?”

“Yes. _Yes_. Angel, just _look_. Look, look, look, it’s _me_. It’s me. Real me, real me, really me, really here.”

Aziraphale’s fingers twitched in his, as though he wanted to reach up and touch his face, but didn’t have the strength to. Crowley lifted his hand instead and pressed the palm of it to his cheek. “See? Real. Really here.”

“But… but the holy water…”

“She missed. Absolutely shit aim. She blasted the lintel to bits, that’s the only way she got in. She couldn’t pass under the Shaddai. Like she’d hit a brick wall. You clever sod.” _The righteous run into it and are safe._ Aziraphale thought of him as _the righteous_ , and it had worked. There was too much there, too many things to think about, and Aziraphale looked dazed and scared – Crowley tucked the thought away in the back of his mind for later, with a thousand others. “It’s _me_ , angel, I promise. I swear. I swear by God’s Name. You put it in the envelope for the genizah, remember? You met your mate Harry, he wants you to do another load of boring lectures on Maimonides. I swear, Aziraphale, please.”

“I can’t,” Aziraphale said. His voice climbed an octave with every word. “I can’t Ican’tIcan’t-“

There was an awful madness in his eyes, like a cornered animal, and Crowley pressed a kiss to the inside of Aziraphale’s palm. Anything. He’d do _anything_ to bring Aziraphale back from where he’d been pushed. “You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to miss me, you don’t have to doubt, I’m here. I’m here. She’s dead, and gone, and she’s never coming back, and she’ll never touch you again, and I’m _alive_ and _I’m here._ ”

Aziraphale looked like he hardly dared to hope it could be true. That he wasn’t alone. Crowley could interpret the expression because the memory of that feeling was lodged in his heart like a piece of glass. “You’re _alive_?”

“Yup. Yes. Very much so. Not dead. Neither of us are. If we were dead I wouldn’t feel so shitty and you wouldn’t look so shitty, would you?”

“… _Shitty_?” Aziraphale said.

The _prim offence_ cracked Crowley’s spine and finally allowed relief to bloom from it. Aziraphale’s eyes were still half-blank, but that _voice_ was the one he knew, just for a second. He laughed damply. “Yeah. Honestly, angel, what a state. And knowing how shitty I look right now that’s saying something.”

“I thought you were dead…” Aziraphale said, and his other hand trembled against Crowley’s knee. Crowley captured it.

“Wasn’t. Aren’t. I’m fine. I’m _fine_. And you will be too.”

“It hurts,” Aziraphale said, and closed his eyes.

“Hey, hey, I know. I know. Open your eyes. Keep them open for me, eh?” Crowley said, and smiled again when Aziraphale obeyed. “… don’t want to be alone.”

Something new filtered across Aziraphale’s face, and after a second Crowley recognised it as _concern_. It was so typically Aziraphale that Crowley had to physically restrain himself from kissing him. Aziraphale’s hand twitched where Crowley still held it to his cheek. “It’ll be all right,” he said softly, and the attempt at bravery and comfort made Crowley’s own mouth twist with the effort of holding back tears.

“Thanks. I,” Crowley tried, and began again. He fumbled in his jacket for his phone. It was tricky, because with his left he kept Aziraphale’s hand pressed to his cheek. “I’ll get us somewhere safe. I’ll just- Don’t even know where we are.”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale said. He seemed to regard this as a personal failing. “I’m sorry…”

“No. Don’t you bloody dare start that,” Crowley said firmly, and on instinct kissed the inside of Aziraphale’s palm again. This time Aziraphale blinked at the sight, and looked at their hands in exhausted wonder. “Nothing to be sorry for. So don’t you dare. I’ll ring the operator – it’s zero for the operator, right? It’s usually zero in a hotel…” He tried ringing zero.

(It is _not_ zero for the operator.)

Crowley growled at his phone. With his left hand he unthinkingly brought Aziraphale’s arm down and cradled it to his chest, and with his right he rang 999.

“Emergency, which service do you require? Fire, Police or Ambulance?”

“Er,” Crowley said. “I don’t know where I am.”

Crowley could _hear_ the call handler’s exasperation. “Sir, this number is for emergencies _only_.”

“Er, it is. My friend is, er, lost, and I don’t know where he is, and I don’t know where I am either.”

The call handler sighs. “Putting you through to the police.”

“Wiltshire Police Service.”

Wiltshire – fucking _Wiltshire_. “Er, yeah, hi, I, um, woke up and I don’t know where I am.”

“… sir, are you calling from a mobile phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Smart phone?”

“Course.”

“… have you tried turning your location on?”

“Wait,” Crowley says. “It can do that?”

“Press the speaker button, sir. The little megaphone.” Crowley suddenly had the very vivid vision of tearing this patronising prick’s voice-box out of his throat. “Why don’t you try opening Google Maps?”

Crowley pressed the app. A map appeared. A small blue dot showed them to be in the countryside near Market Lavington. “Er.”

“Have you been drinking, sir?”

“No!” Crowley said. “I mean, er, yes. Must have wandered. Okay, thanks!”

“Sir, in future, you must only ring this number in the case of an _actual_ -“

Crowley hung up. Incredible. And _shit,_ he hoped Heaven and Hell didn’t know about Google Maps. He _did_ know about the general Google app, so he typed in the word ‘taxi’ and called the first number that came up.

“I need a taxi. Right now. I can pay whatever,” Crowley said, and looked down at Aziraphale. “Biggest one you’ve got.”

Aziraphale looked up at him woozily. “M’not that big, am I…?”

Crowley suddenly noticed Aziraphale’s hand was flat over his heart, fingers spread, and his breath hitched. “Don’t be daft. Your wings are in a state and I don’t want to mess them around too much. I’ll get us somewhere safe.”

“Shin, dalet, yod…”

“I know, angel, I know. Don’t worry, I’ll do it.” He hoped he wouldn’t be struck by lightning immediately if he tried. It’d probably burn his hand off. Maybe he could use Aziraphale’s hand and puppet it.

Aziraphale’s hand that was pressed to his heart.

Crowley felt as though if they were to stop touching he would die of loss.

“Sir, _where would you like your taxi from_?”

He finally registers the tinny voice from his phone. “What? Oh, we’re… Okay, Market Lavington, and er, go north? The north-east road. We’re somewhere in the green bit. And we’re in a barn. No, I don’t know whose barn it is! Just go up the road and look in the barns! No, wait, wait, just put me on to the driver. I’ll give directions. Hey, you the driver? Great: **_COME TO ME_**.” He hung up, the extra bit of magic making his head spin, and dropped his phone. “Sorted. On their way.”

Aziraphale was _staring_ at him. His eyes lingered on his sweat-plastered hair, on his lips, on his eyes. On his eyes the most. “The… the mastic…”

“Oh, shit, right.” Crowley hesitated as he reached for the censer. The embers were still smoking, just. “Do you want me to get rid of it? It’s probably helping with the pain…”

He thought that Aziraphale would say it didn’t matter if it helped with the pain. That the lack of control was worse than the pain.

Instead Aziraphale just… looked at him. “Tears. Of the resin. With the book. Can be chewed.”

Crowley had the stomach-turning sensation of holding something momentous and ineffably fragile in his hands. “I’ll bring some. If you want. If you think it’ll help with your wings. They’re a mess. Sorting them out might hurt, but the mastic might help…”

“Might. I don’t know. I don’t know if - I just…” Aziraphale said. “I can’t think. I can’t think.”

“It’s all right. Don’t need to,” Crowley said softly. “I’ll think. I’ll work it out. I’ll look after you.”

Aziraphale nodded, and his eyes closed.

Crowley indulged in a _moment_ then, and finally realised that Aziraphale was almost completely naked. The only thing which the fiery chains hasn’t burnt up was his signet ring.

Even now, even amidst all the horror, some small part of him at the back of his mind clamoured that for the very first time, he was able to dress Aziraphale. It has always been one of those embarrassing fantasies, reawakened every time Aziraphale wore some awful new outfit. The angel never manifested his clothes – Crowley had wondered whether it was a holdover of the whole cherub wings thing – and always had them made. If only this was happening in any other situation. If only Crowley had the time to savour it, the chance to think and enjoy Aziraphale’s reaction.

Instead, his only aim was to put even a thin barrier of fabric between Aziraphale and the blood-smeared, dusty, cold concrete floor.

He looked down at what his mind had plucked from the material plane and sighed.

The taxi driver, who had no idea how he’d known where to drive to or just how many traffic laws he’d broken to get there as quickly as possible, was parked in the farm courtyard. Crowley carried the handbag under his arm, which now contained the leftover mastic and the grimoire (Nice souvenir for Aziraphale. It was too dangerous to leave alone, and Aziraphale would probably kill him for destroying a 15th century incunabulum even if it was full of info on how to torture angels). He supported Aziraphale to the taxi, half-carrying him; the angel was dressed in blue silk pyjamas, and his scorched and bleeding wings trailed dust after them.

“Hi,” Crowley said, looking in the window at the taxi driver. He remembered three seconds too late that he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses. “Thanks for being so fast. I want you to take us to the closest decent B&B, hotel, whatever, I don’t want you to say a word, and I want you to forget all about my friend’s wings. In return, I’ll give you five hundred quid. Deal?”

The driver nodded without a word, and Crowley grinned tiredly. “Good man. All right.” Folding Aziraphale into the taxi was a pain, even if it was the size of a black cab, and the angel’s face was white with pain. Eventually he sat on the floor, head in his arms on the seat, facing backwards, while Crowley held his wings up to stop them from being crushed or banged about.

The taxi driver thought about telling them that all passengers were obliged by law to wear a seatbelt.

He decided against it.


	9. Intoxication

As Crowley had directed, the taxi driver drove right up to the front step of the Manor House Hotel and Golf Club. Aziraphale was wearing no shoes, after all, and in front of the hotel was the typical manor house gravel. Crowley sent the driver away with five hundred pounds and a new phobia of swans, and helped support Aziraphale into the hotel. “Nearly there. Few more steps, angel,” he said, and smiled at the receptionist.

At least he’d remembered his sunglasses this time. Not that it mattered too much, when his face and hands were covered in blood, and he was half-carrying a barefoot man wearing blood-stained pyjamas, with gore-clotted hair, an overwhelming smell of woody incense about him, and a ten-foot wingspan. “Hi. Morning. Eyes on me, ignore my friend. We need a room.”

The receptionist didn’t blink as her eyes flicked to his. “Check-in’s at 3, sir.”

“We need a room _right now_. Biggest you’ve got.”

“Our biggest room is the Lordsmew.”

The receptionist looks like she desperately wants to look back at Aziraphale. His head is drooping onto Crowley’s shoulder, and he’s becoming more of a dead weight every second. “Perfect. Whatever. With food.” If anything could perk Aziraphale up while he recovered from a mastic hangover, surely it’d be some nice fancy hotel food.

“Package with dinner and breakfast for the Lordsmew Suite is £630 pounds per night.”

“Fine,” Crowley said, and handed over a black Centurion Card and a passport which hadn’t been in his hand a second ago. “Feel free to check with them. We don’t have any luggage. Where is it?”

The receptionist looked like she wanted to object _very stridently._ “Just up the Grand Staircase, sir; I’ll show you up myself.”

“Perfect.” He gritted his teeth and pulled Aziraphale upright again. “Angel. Come on. Couple more minutes.”

“Are you… on holiday in Wiltshire?” the receptionist said as she led them up the stairs.

“Er, yeah.”

“Lovely,” she says, with a painful rictus. “If you want to use the golf club facilities-“

“Nope.”

“Crowley…” Aziraphale murmured in his ear. “We need to…”

“I know, I know. Don’t worry. Look, we’re here, let’s get you onto the bed. Which hurts more, front or wings?”

“Wings….”

“Okay,” Crowley said. The receptionist unlocked the door with a large iron key, and tried to look at Aziraphale through her peripheral vision. Crowley manoeuvred them in, and dropped Aziraphale face down on the bed.

“Is the room to your satisfaction, sir?” the receptionist said, voice strangled.

“Lovely,” Crowley says, with a grin and without a single glance at the room. Suddenly the key was in his hand, and in the receptionist's was the telltale red of a crisp £50. “Could you send two bottles of whisky up? Just leave them outside the door. Thanks.”

He shut the door in her face, and locked it. He leant his forehead against the beeswax-polished oak, and sighed. Stars of exhaustion were exploding under his eyelids. He swallowed painfully, then turned back into the room. “Right. See? I told you I’d sort it.”

“Sorted,” Aziraphale slurred, and tried to push himself up from the tasteful Liberty print quilt. “You've got blood, on your face…”

“Oh, right,” Crowley said. He scrunched his nose, and felt his skin grow tight; a few flakes floated down. “Urgh. Don’t worry, I’m not hurt. Just a nosebleed. We need to get you clean too.”

“Not yet…” Aziraphale said piteously. “Please…”

“Okay. Yeah. No worries. You just sleep for a bit. Bath can wait. Can I…?” Aziraphale didn’t open his eyes, so Crowley agonised for a second before vanishing his pyjama shirt. He lifted Aziraphale up onto his side, and healed the burns on his front to shiny newness. “There. More comfortable.”

Aziraphale murmured something that had the warmth of gratitude with absolutely no enunciation. Crowley lowered him back onto his front. The blood that was crusted in his hair was already staining the pillowcase.

There was a knock on the door to announce the arrival of the whisky. Crowley tipped the porter with another fifty and locked the door again.

Aziraphale was unconscious. His wings were an absolute state; Crowley thought that he’d have to pluck several damaged secondaries. He'd try to save the primaries at least, but... He opened one of the whiskies and necked it, too tired to locate a glass. All he wanted to do was lie down on the bed, and sleep for a month, but first… Absolutely first, a boiling hot shower. There was so much blood on him.

He dumped Naqamiel’s handbag on one of the fancy chairs by the window, vanished his clothes, and carried the bottle of whisky into the waterfall shower with him. He’d feel better if he was at least a little drunk, he reckoned, swigging it as he rubbed some Molton Brown shampoo through his hair with his free hand. Drunk, he’d be able to spend more energy healing Aziraphale than his craven body thought he could. Good of God to provide humanity with a common sense override like that. Drunk, he wouldn’t have to think about everything Aziraphale had said.

Drunk, he wouldn’t have to remember his screaming.

He used a mouthful of whisky to swish the blood from his mouth and spat it down the plughole. The heat was unknotting his overtaxed muscles, and the water was washing the pus and plasma and blood from him. His chest heaved, and he drank more whisky to dissolve the tears in before they could fall.

He got out, wearing one of the plush towel sheets and nothing else. The idea of waking Aziraphale and picking him up to help him write the Shaddai on the door frame was genuinely less terrifying than the thought of being struck by lightning for his presumption. _Ex opere operato,_ he reasoned, and it was for Aziraphale’s sake. If it really did work… Before he could think about it any more he picked up the biro from beside the phone, and scrawled a shin, a dalot, and a yod on the lintel.

Nothing happened – no lightning, but no blue flame either. “Oh, fuck You too.” Crowley nearly gave the lintel the finger. Instead he walked around to the other side of the bed, fell on top of it, and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

*

Aziraphale woke up when two people walked in the corridor outside the room. He heard loud laughter and was instantly awake, going from a painful, burning dream to a room lit with early afternoon sunlight, but the laughter moved away, and gradually his heartbeat began to slow.

He felt very drunk. He was too tired to turn over, but he could see satinwood furniture and damask curtains. White wainscoting. William Morris wallpaper. Brass lamp.

No Crowley.

He didn’t panic, not yet, because he could hear him. Turning his head was difficult, and _painful_ , but it was worth it, because there on the bed next to him was the most beautiful sight in the world. Crowley was flat on his back, mouth open. He was snoring softly, with a hissing exhale that he tried to hide when he was awake. His hair was damp, but he was unbloodied. He was only wearing a towel wrapped low around his hips, but Aziraphale couldn’t see any injuries. That was the important thing.

He didn’t have the strength to pull the coverlet out from under them to put on top of Crowley. He didn’t have the strength to get up.

So he lowered one charred, bloody wing across Crowley’s chest, and let the darkness carry him again.

*

Crowley woke when the light was golden-warm. One of Aziraphale’s wings was spread across his chest. Almost as though to keep him warm… But that was stupid. A stupid thought.

_Not if Aziraphale loved him._

He sobered himself up, as apparently the whisky had decided to betray him anyway, and very, very gently, touched Aziraphale’s wing. Pearlescent coverts and charred and bloodied coverts… There was a patch torn out, just under his hand. He pulled away, feeling sick, and rolled out from under the wing and up off the bed.

He looked down at Aziraphale properly then, and dread crashed down on his head. Aziraphale looked _shit_. His skin was pale with a creeping net of purple, and his breathing was shallow and quick. What had he forgotten? He left proper healings to Aziraphale – demons weren’t known for their First fucking Aid. “Aziraphale!” he said, shaking his shoulder. “Shitshitshit, wake up!”

Aziraphale’s eyes snapped open.

“You’re ill, angel, and I don’t know what to do,” he said, crouching down beside the bed so he could meet Aziraphale’s eyes. “You were burnt – I’ve closed the burns, I think I’ve healed the skin, but you’re ill. What have I missed?”

Aziraphale’s eyes were unfocused, but he frowned. “Liquid. Plasma loss.”

Crowley remembered touching one of the burns on Aziraphale’s skin: the blister bursting, the skin coming away, the clear liquid that followed it. “Right. What do I do for that? What do you need? Blood? Water?”

“Mm. Both,” Aziraphale said.

Right, Crowley thought. That he could do.

They had swapped bodies, after all. It was an important distinction to make: they had _not_ gone into each other’s bodies. They had taken off their bodies like an outfit, and _swapped_ them, every cell flowing to the other.

Human bodies on spiritual beings worked rather like a spacesuit. It made getting the job done in a hostile environment much easier, but was a technical and expensive piece of equipment rather than a pair of jammies, and most found them uncomfortable and difficult to move in. Aziraphale was injured, the real Aziraphale, but he’d be in a much worse position if his spacesuit failed too.

Crowley went to the bathroom, ran a glass of water, and put it on the table. “Need you to be sitting,” he said, and helped Aziraphale up. He picked up the glass, and held the rim to Aziraphale’s lips. “Drink this.”

He _hated_ himself as soon as he did, because Aziraphale obeyed without hesitation, and Crowley suddenly remembered the mastic. Shit. With his free hand he took Aziraphale’s and _willed_ some of his blood to fill the vacuum in Aziraphale’s body. He felt a little nauseated, a little dizzy, but the awful mottling on Aziraphale’s skin faded.

Aziraphale was still drinking, and Crowley pulled the glass away. “Stop, stop. Your body’ll be sick if you go too fast.”

“Sorry,” Aziraphale said. “It’s… less painful to just obey.”

“ _Fuck._ No, I am,” Crowley said, agonised. “Should’ve thought. I’ll be more careful.”

“It’s all right. I know it’s to help.”

“It’s _not_ all right, even if it _is_ to help. I’ll be more careful. I promise.”

“It’s _all right_ , my dear,” Aziraphale said. Crowley was still holding his hand, and Aziraphale squeezed it. “I feel… feel a bit better. Heart’s less fast.”

“Good. I had a sleep, I can heal you a bit more now.”

“It’ll keep. You’re exhausted.”

“Don’t be stupid. I know it hurts.” Crowley put the glass down, and reached out. His hand hovered over Aziraphale’s shoulder. “If you…?”

“Really, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “Yes. Of course. Thank you.”

Aziraphale’s skin felt clammy and hot to the touch, but Crowley was able to completely heal one of the nastier burns. This gave him a measure of confidence back. “I ordered us some whisky.”

“I’d better not. It’ll dehydrate the body again.”

“Your body,” Crowley corrected automatically, and winced when Aziraphale did. “The body.”

“Just… not yet. Easier to think of it as something separate,” Aziraphale said. “Not that it matters. My wings were… She made me bring my wings out.”

“That sick bitch,” Crowley said. He concentrated on healing another burn on Aziraphale’s arm so that he wouldn’t have to think of her hands on Aziraphale’s wings. “Once your- the body’s done, we can think, about the wings. How to help.”

Aziraphale nodded. “… and you? Are you hurt?”

“Not a scratch,” Crowley said. “I mean, a bit of one. Crashed the Bentley. But I healed myself.”

“Oh, darling,” Aziraphale said, and the word sank into Crowley like summer warmth. “I’m sorry.”

“She’ll be fine. Nothing as bad as what the M25 did to her.”

Aziraphale still looked utterly haunted. “And… the holy water?”

“Not a drop. I shrank, she threw it right over my head.”

“I thought-“ Aziraphale said, and his voice broke. “I thought-“

“I know. But I’m not. I’m completely fine. I’ll be better if you take another drink – if you want?”

Aziraphale nodded, and Crowley helped him to sip the water. “How did you kill her?”

“Hellfire. She’s properly dead.”

“I know,” Aziraphale said. He touched his chest. “I can feel the… the loss of her. From the Host.”

“Shit. Of course.” The Fall hadn’t been a sundering, but a shattering. A demon was not just separate from the Host, but also from every other demon. But the obliteration of an angel would be felt by the entire Host.

That had been a price Gabriel had been willing to pay, to kill Aziraphale. Or that had been the whole point. They needed to make an example of traitors, after all.

“I know you had to,” Aziraphale says. “She would never have stopped. She would- she said she would-“ His hands were relatively still, but his wings quivered violently, sending little breezes around the room. It reminded Crowley of the Glorious Revolution. Of the Rebellion. Angels had never been afraid before, and didn’t understand why they couldn’t control their wings. None of them had understood the aching gap in their beings either, after Lucifer had killed that first angel, sent by Michael to summon him before the Archangels to Explain Himself, but the fear was worse.

Angels had been made for the bliss of certainty, but ever since the first time Crowley met him, Aziraphale had been a bundle of nerves and doubt and anxiety.

And from the second time he’d met him, fear as well. Not just of the rebels, but of his own side.

Crowley, who was no stranger to that fear himself, would have done anything to take it from him now.

“I know,” he said carefully. “I couldn’t let her hurt you ever again. So I had to kill her. And they need to know. They brought us to the home turf, and we embarrassed them. We gave them a warning shot that was far more than they deserved. But they need to know now that if they try to get us on _our_ home turf, we’ll annihilate them.” He ran his thumb over Aziraphale’s knuckles. “I’m sorry, though. I know it hurt you.”

“Far less than losing you would have done,” Aziraphale said. He turned over Crowley’s hand, and brought it to his lips. “I can survive losing _her_.”

Crowley felt that kiss like lightning up his arm and down his spine. His hair stood on end. “There you go, then,” he croaks.

“I thought I’d lost you.” Aziraphale lowered Crowley’s hand, and his chest heaved. His pupils were still utterly blown from the mastic, black holes ringed with silver. He was rocking back and forth, just a little, a ghost of his devastated self-soothing east of Eden. Pain, loss, defencelessness… Crowley remembered asking Aziraphale then if he’d been on the incense. “I thought I’d lost you and I wanted to die from the pain of it. I have been… so very stupid for such a very long time,” Aziraphale admitted in an anguished voice.

And then he kissed him.


	10. Consent

Aziraphale’s lips were dry and cracked, and he smelt of blood and smoke and mastic, and he was so weak that when he leant forward his nose bumped right into Crowley’s, and it was, _by far_ , the very best kiss of Crowley’s long life.

Crowley moaned, eyes closed in the bliss of it for just one second. “Ngh.” He wanted nothing more than to grab Aziraphale and kiss every last square inch of him. Instead, he pushed Aziraphale back, and despite himself, his body tried to follow the angel.

Aziraphale looked surprised, then horrified, and then mortified. If he had a drop of spare blood in him it would have drained from his face. “You don’t want… oh, God, oh-“

“No, nonononononono, I want, I want. I _want_ ,” Crowley said desperately. “I have never wanted _anything_ more, in _six thousand years_.”

Aziraphale was staring wide-eyed past him at the expensive Persian carpet on the floor. “Um. Um. Then, um, why-?”

Crowley moved to break up the staring contest, and knelt in front of Aziraphale. “Because you’re not yourself. Because I’m not a bastard. Well, I am, but hopefully not that much of one.”

“I want to kiss you. I want to be _close_ to you. I’m telling the truth. I, I can’t lie, after all,” Aziraphale said, with a soul-destroying attempt at lightness.

“I know, angel. But you can’t say ‘no’, either. And if I got carried away, if I got swept up, then- then you wouldn’t be able to say no to anything more.” Crowley refused to look at what this ‘anything more’ could possibly be. His hindbrain screamed at him for attention.

“… ‘carried away’?”

“Yeah. Ngk. By you.”

Aziraphale looked astonished. “Me?” It wasn’t coy or coquettish. It was straightforward disbelief that he could engender those kind of feelings.

“You. I could hurt you.”

The astonishment vanished, and was replaced by a deep sadness. He touched Crowley’s hand with his fingertips. “I trust you, Crowley.”

That sent heat _pouring_ through him, pooling at the base of his spine, in his chest, under Aziraphale’s fingers. “I know,” Crowley croaked. “I know. But I don’t.”

Aziraphale takes his hands then. “My dear one. I know you’d never hurt me.”

“Of course I would. Never _deliberately_ , but we’ve both hurt each other plenty over the years. And this is too important. It’d be wrong let you while you’re- while you’re, you know. Vulnerable.”

Aziraphale looked down at their hands. He looked so _ill_ , so pale and lined and drawn. “I’m sorry. I’m-“

“No, _shit, please_ don’t say you’re sorry,” Crowley said, and wanted to immolate himself when Aziraphale’s second apology was strangled out of his throat. “Oh fuckinggjsljddjsh. Hrgh. Okay. Okay. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean to tell you not to. What I mean is… Um. Is I don’t _need_ you to. You’ve been feeling guilty since literally the first time I met you, so I know it’s a stretch, but. I don’t want you to feel sorry for this, ever. But, also. That’s a perfect example. Of why. That’s why.”

Aziraphale swallowed painfully. He raised his hand to Crowley’s face, but didn’t touch him. “Even if I… if I’m…” He saw Aziraphale make that unfamiliar but addictive expression of building up to something really, really _dangerous_. “Even if I love you?”

The voice at the back of Crowley’s head that he had been strenuously shoving back finally broke free. “Yes! Yes, you blessed idiot, _especially_ if you love me! Because I love _you_!”

He regretted the outburst instantly, for the tone of it at the absolute very least. The holy water had missed but he was about to be annihilated by pure embarrassment instead, and, frankly, it’d be a mercy.

Oh, but Aziraphale lit up like the sun. “ _Crowley.”_

Crowley nearly turned his head to kiss Aziraphale’s fingers, to properly _taste_ them, but that would definitely be sending mixed signals. He _did_ lean against them, in mortified exhaustion. “Shit, I didn’t… I didn’t mean to drop that on you while you were roofied. I promise, we’ll talk about it afterwards. Later. When you’re… I promise.” He looked beseechingly at Aziraphale, who swallowed with visible pain, but nodded.

Great. Future Crowley could deal with that. Present Crowley exhaled, able to breathe again without feeling like his lungs were full of shards of glass. “Need to know I’m not going too fast for you.”

“You’re not. You’re not, darling,” Aziraphale said. He very gently stroked Crowley’s cheek. “I know that hurt you. I’m sorry for that, too.”

It soothed him a little that Aziraphale could still apologise. It meant he hadn’t fucked up too badly. “You shouldn’t be. I mean, yeah, it hurt. But it didn’t mean it was wrong of you. Whatever Heaven’s told you, it’s not wrong to ask for what you need.”

Aziraphale’s fingertips were where his hair met his temple, infinitely gentle. “You’re so good,” he said in soft wonder.

Crowley smiled up at him. “Oi. No need to be rude. Hey.” He rose and snaked his arms around Aziraphale. The closeness, the sighing sob with which Aziraphale buried his face in Crowley’s neck, the warmth of their bare chests pressed to each other…

They had shot past each other, but this… this felt like a safe place to land, until they could try flying again.

*

Crowley’s neck smelt of soap and jasmine. Aziraphale clung to him, his fingers like claws.

It was Crowley who pulled away first. He looked down at Aziraphale with concern, and clothed himself with a snap of his fingers. “I’ll run a bath. You’ll feel- Argh. That would be the kind of thing which would help you feel better.”

It was very like Crowley. He was a snake after all – shedding the old and emerging new and clean. “Just let me put down my sea-flower…”

Crowley snorted, and looked at Aziraphale with gratitude. “I remember that… What did he say he’d called it?”

“ _’The Old Man Becomes a Young Man_.’ He wasn’t very imaginative…”

“Enkidu was the brains of that particular operation, which is saying something.” Crowley set the bath to running, and walked back into the room. “Why didn’t he eat it himself as soon as he got it?”

“Ah – he wanted to test it out on one of his subjects first. In case it was poisonous.”

“Absolutely charming fellow.” Crowley perched on the bed besides Aziraphale. “I should get these as healed as much as I can. We’ll need some ice for your wings… I’ll ring down for some, while you’re in the bath.”

Aziraphale had the feeling this would go against the New Terms, but the sick fear was unbearable. “… would you stay? Please?”

“Course,” Crowley said without hesitation. “If that’s what you want.”

“I’m being silly. I _know_ I’m being silly. But I feel as though if- if you go out I’ll never see you again. That something will happen to you.”

“Nothing will happen,” Crowley said. It wasn’t a promise he could make, he knew, but he knew all too well what Aziraphale was feeling. “Cold water’ll do just as well, probably. We never had much ice in the old days.”

“No. What was it… two thousand years? Before they learnt how to store ice.”

“Wasn’t it three? I remember them in China.”

“No, it was definitely two. Zimri-Lim had a marvellous ice-house in Terqa.”

“In _Terqa_? Wow,” Crowley said, thinking. “I thought you were hanging out there because it was halfway between Mesopotamia and Israel.”

“That’s what I said on my reports,” Aziraphale said, with a sheepish smile, and Crowley laughed. “It was so clever. I do love them so.”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, and his eyes were soft. “Well, I’ll order an ice bucket later, and some fizz. All right, up you get. Let me help. Oh, shit-“

“Crowley, do please stop being an _entire_ idiot,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley relaxed a little. 

“Oh, wait, while you’re up,” Crowley said, and held him up in front of the door. “I wrote the Shaddai on the door, but I don’t think it worked. She’s not speaking to me.”

Aziraphale focused with a great deal of effort on the biro scratches, and frowned. He pressed his hand against the door and felt the warm solidity of it. “It did.”

Against him, Crowley went very, very still. The muscles in his arms were hard. “It did?”

“Yes. It’s there. I can feel it.”

“… oh. Well. Humans use it too,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale could have wept in his anger.

Between them they managed to get into the huge bathroom, though Aziraphale’s wings did send all the complimentary little bottles to the floor. Once he was in the bath Azirphale leant forwards in exhaustion; even that small exertion had knocked the strength from him. His skin felt tight and taut where it was fully healed, and hot and painful where it wasn’t, but it was his wings that were agony.

“Trousers on or off?” Crowley said somewhere behind him. To give him a semblance of modesty, in all likelihood.

“Off,” Aziraphale said, and just like that, he was naked. He brought his legs up to his chest, and Crowley turned on the taps. He tested the water with his fingertips until it was cool without being uncomfortable, as solicitous as a new mother.

How had he never seen it before? How had he been so oblivious for so long?

Because if he’d allowed himself to know Crowley could love like this, he’d have had to confront Heaven so much sooner. He would have had to rage against God for Her lack of forgiveness and patience and loving-kindness to this, the most surprising and clear-eyed of all Her creations.

Maybe She had made him to be a deck-light, as he said to Naqamiel, but oh, that was unfair. Why was it that it was always Her best ones that She sent to the darkest places?

The cool water was like a balm, and he groaned in relief as some of the dull burn seeped from his skin. Crowley made a pleased hum, and passed him a bottle of shampoo, already opened. It felt kind to Aziraphale, in this heart-broken and dazed state, that they would smell the same.

“Do you want me to do your hair for you?” Crowley offered, and Aziraphale closed his eyes against the tears.

“Yes. Yes. Please.”

This was a good compromise, because Aziraphale couldn’t lie. If Crowley asked, he could say no _or_ yes, and that was the definition of consent that Crowley was happy with. He picked a glass up from the sink that had survived Aziraphale’s wings, and began to pour water over Aziraphale’s hair. “Careful, eyes,” he said, when he had completed this baptism, and began to rub the floral-smelling shampoo through his hair. “Any bumps?”

“No, no,” Aziraphale said. It was so bittersweet: the tenderness of Crowley’s fingers in his hair, and the sick guilt and fear in his own heart. The soap foam that ran down into the water was stained with brown and red, and he closed his eyes again. He felt Crowley heal a small burn on his left ear. “Crowley, I don’t know what to do.”

Crowley’s fingers moved in his hair. “You don’t need to do anything.”

“I do. I don’t know what, but I… I’ve actually been feeling a little angry.”

Aziraphale could _hear_ Crowley raise his eyebrow. “At Heaven? Wow. Whatever for.”

“No. At God.” Crowley’s fingers instantly stilled. “I love you, and She’s hurt you so much. You were right about everything. But I still love Her. I love Her, and I love you, and I don’t know how to reconcile that.

“Because… I’m a demon?” Crowley said, so carefully.

“No. _No,_ ” Aziraphale said; he opened his eyes, and immediately got soap in them. He spent energy he didn’t have clearing them, because he needed to take Crowley’s hands. He’d have died in that moment if it was the only way to look into Crowley’s eyes. “Because She’s hurt you _so much_. And I’ve always made excuses for Her. I’m so sorry.”

Aziraphale could see Crowley struggling to find the words. Eventually he just touched his knuckle to Aziraphale’s cheek. “I forgive you.”

Aziraphale exhaled, and Crowley bent over and touched their foreheads together. “If you need forgiveness then _I forgive you_. But you don’t need to carry this, Aziraphale. That’s the point of us. _I understand._ Love and anger aren’t mutually exclusive. I’ve been angry at you loads of times. But I understood too. I know what it is to love Her and hate Her at the same time. To blame Her and to miss Her.”

Crowley’s words were halting and pained. Aziraphale could feel him forcing them out, as he tried to spin his own thoughts into sounds, for Aziraphale’s sake. “I mean… I think you were right too. The Name held Naqamiel out. Maybe stopping Armageddon _was_ part of the Ineffable Plan. God just chooses when to help, when not to help. She’s playing silly buggers and I’ve given up trying to work out Her rules. You think I was right, that it’s _us_ we need to think about, and I think you were right, about the whole thing just being all ineffable, with emphasis on the _eff_. So if you’re angry at God, it’s all right to be angry. If you still love Her, it’s all right to love Her. I’m here, and I understand, and I love you.”

All he could see were Crowley’s eyes, golden and black. The fear and the guilt were still there, but they were fading, overwhelmed by the rush of admiration and adoration Aziraphale felt building up in him, pouring out of him. They made Crowley’s eyes gleam, and the demon pressed a kiss to his forehead like a benediction.

“Right. Eyes front.” Aziraphale obeyed, and Crowley didn’t apologise; he was too busy drinking from the bottle of whisky. Aziraphale could hear the glug of the liquid, and the sound of the glass rim knocking against Crowley’s front teeth. He felt desperate for some alcohol himself – anything to numb the rawness of his nerves and his soul. But then Crowley’s fingers were in his hair again, resuming their gentle tripsis.

*

The bath water was murky with soot and blood and soap scum and Crowley didn’t even want to _think_ what else. He was well on his way to finishing the whisky. He let out the plug and filled the glass from the tap. “Rinsing – eyes closed,” he said, and poured it over Aziraphale’s head.

The angel was still curled up, legs tight to his chest, cheek resting on his knees. Always so guilty, Crowley thought, through a dark haze of anger. Always so guilty, and anxious, and trying so hard to juggle a hundred conflicting instincts. He wasn’t going to be like Heaven, he promised himself. He was going to treat Aziraphale better than Heaven treated either of them. He was going to make him well again. He was going to build him up where Naqamiel tried to break him down. Aziraphale belonged to _him_.

It was a jealous, possessive thing. His body thrummed with it. This wasn’t optimism, but _determination_. He healed a long burn on Aziraphale’s back, and rinsed out the last of the soap from his hair. “There. It’ll be back to the usual mess in no time.”

Aziraphale sighed, and raked his hair back from his forehead. “Thank you, my dear.” Crowley vanished the rest of the mess from the bath, and began to run the water again, a little warmer this time. “It smelt nice.”

“It did, didn’t it? I used it earlier. Couldn’t stand all the bloody mastic.”

“Hm. Quite.” Aziraphale looked up at him. “I always loved your hair, you know. It's always so shiny. And when you had it long you’d have little plaits or curls or charms in it… I. This is embarrassing. I copied you, once. After the Flood.”

It was a gift, an embarrassing little secret, the only gift Aziraphale could give right now. Crowley’s face split into a grin. “Oh yeah?”

“Yes. I only got it down to my collar, and even that took ages. It always curled too much.”

“I like your curls. What happened? You had it short the next time I saw you.”

“Oh, Michael was down for something. Said it looked terrible. Made me cut it off.”

Crowley hissed in displeasure, mixing a little shower gel into the water. “You could grow it long, now. No one to stop you.”

“Oh, no. I don’t think I could. I’d look ridiculous.”

“Never stopped you before.”

“Oh, hush,” Aziraphale said, with absolutely no heat. “Besides. What would my barber say?”

“Doesn’t matter. Only matters what _you_ like. And me, obviously.”

“Obviously.” Aziraphale’s smile was very tender. He looked exhausted and cold. “What now?”

“I want to sort your wings, if you’re up to it? Then you can sleep while they dry. Here. I really don’t want to use the mastic.”

“No,” Aziraphale agreed, and took the bottle of whisky. He had to hold it with both hands. He was wearing his processing expression, as Crowley thought of it; he felt horribly helpless.

Aziraphale took a swig of the whisky and handed it back to Crowley, who finished it. “I’ll get the other,” Crowley said. “Five seconds.”

It was twenty, because in the bedroom Crowley had to scream silently at Heaven for a good ten of them. “You’re a sshower of basstards,” he whispered through gritted teeth. They cut off three of his fucking heads, and wouldn’t even let him have his hair long on the last one. The _pettiness_ of it. Centuries of neglect, punctuated by controlling demands.

And then when he did come back into the bathroom, opening the bottle with his teeth, Aziraphale was staring at the door with huge eyes, waiting to see him again. Crowley shoved his panic down but allowed his protectiveness to run free. “Here. It’s decent. Take a swig. Ready?”

Aziraphale nodded, but he still yelped when Crowley touched his right wing. “Sorry.”

“No, ‘s fine,” Crowley lied, and began to look for the worst damage. His eyes skittered over the two long, old scars on Aziraphale’s back. He dunked a flannel in the cool water (the hotel had not provided one, being more for muslin cloths, but Crowley had wanted one, and his hand found it automatically). “You’ve got a nasty one on your saddle joint. It’ll hurt.”

“You can hold it down,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t mind if it hurts, I don’t want to knock you back.”

“Okay,” Crowley said, and gently, very gently, pressed the cold cloth to the injury. Aziraphale hissed, and Crowley saw him grip the handholds of the bathtub, but his ribs went unbroken. “That’s it.”

It took a long time. Crowley had dreamt of this for so long, of being wrist deep in Aziraphale's feathers, but now the moment was here, he was just tired. Between the pain of the burns and the sensation of Crowley carefully sponging and preening his wings Aziraphale was lying forwards across the gunwale of the tub, loose and limp.

As he began working on his left wing Crowley spotted the small patch of bright crimson feathers. “What’s this?”

“Hmm?” Aziraphale lifted his head like it weighed a thousand tonnes. “What?”

“The red. You didn’t have this in Eden.”

“The red… Oh. Gethsemane. Before Judas arrived. Jesus was crying. Sweated blood, he was so scared, the poor thing…”

“That was you?”

“Mm. Yes. Yes, I was with him for most of it. He didn’t let me come with him into the desert, obviously. He had to talk with you on his own.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t ask. And I thought you were angry about it. Wouldn’t like the reminder…”

“I was angry about it,” Crowley admitted. “So what, it’s been stained ever since?”

“Hm. It’s only a small patch. I looked at it in the mirror, once.”

“You’ve checked your wings in the mirror? Vanity, angel.”

Aziraphale snorted; they both knew perfectly well that Crowley was the fastidious preener of the two of them. “Well, you’d been giving me grief.”

“Yes, because you never looked after your wings properly.” Crowley looked after his wings with oil and combs and mirrors on sticks. You’d never let another demon at your back, so you learnt quickly. But Aziraphale never had, and without another angel to groom them for him he’d just let them become tattered. It had always depressed Crowley, and before he was able to admit his feelings to himself the sadness had made him angry. “Doesn't matter. You’ve got me to look after them now.”

*

By the time Crowley had finished both wings, the water was freezing, and Aziraphale was completely wrung out. Crowley looked as tired as he felt. He helped him out, and clothed Aziraphale with a gesture.

The back of the pyjama shirt was split open at the back into three strips. Aziraphale smiled at Crowley. “Tailor for the discerning angel…”

“Advantage of just manifesting them. Don’t have to worry about tearing seams,” Crowley said. They both hobbled into the bedroom like old men. “There. If you lie on your front, I’ll go over them with the hair dryer.”

“It’s all right. They can air dry,” Aziraphale said.

“Hmm. I don’t know what to do with the damaged ones.” He’d had to pluck some of the irredeemable feathers out (Aziraphale drinking far too much from the whisky bottle given his state of dehydration, but they both thought it was better than the mastic) and couldn’t throw them away. They’d be too powerful if they got into the wrong hands.

“We’ll think about it later,” Aziraphale mumbled against his shoulder. “Rest…”

“Sleep, if you can. Sorry. You could sleep.” Crowley picked up the grotty pillows and tossed them across the room, revealing the clean ones underneath. “I know you don’t tend to, but it’ll honestly help.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You did it earlier. You don’t need to do anything. If you close your eyes, your body will do it for you, when you’re as tired as this.”

“… what if something happens?” Aziraphale _hated_ how small his voice sounded, but Crowley didn’t laugh at him. Instead he helped him lie down on his front, and then walked around the bed.

“I’ll be here, all night. I’ll nap myself. We’ll both be fine.” Crowley brought the quilt up over Aziraphale’s legs, then snuggled into the bed himself. “See?”

Aziraphale brought up his hand and placed it on the sheets between them. It was very dark outside now, and the room was warmly lit with the brass lamps. He already felt the loss of Crowley’s touch, and the cold fear that sent tendrils around his heart. “Could I… Could we…?” He glanced at his hand, and then at Crowley.

“Really, _angel_ ,” Crowley said in that tone of voice which said nonetheless that he’d give Aziraphale anything he asked for, even if he thought he was an idiot for asking. _Especially_ if he thought he was an idiot for asking. He brought Aziraphale’s hand to his lips, and then interlaced their fingers. “Right here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative Title: Anthony J. Crowley runs a consent workshop.
> 
> The 'sea-flower' is a reference to the Epic of Gilgamesh. When his boyfriend Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh has an existential crisis and goes on a quest to find the secret of immortality. He meets Utnapishtim, who survived the Flood, and generally makes an arse of himself. Eventually, mainly to get him to fuck off, Utnapishtim tells him that if he dives to the bottom of the sea he'll find a plant that gives whoever eats it immortality. Gilgamesh finds the plant, but decides not to eat it right away because he wants to give it to a guinea pig first. When he's in the bath a snake comes along and eats it, which is why the snake is able to shed its skin and become young again. 
> 
> King Zimri-Lim of Mari did indeed have an ice house, the flash bastard.


	11. Wings

Crowley was woken up the next morning by the desperate buffeting of a massive fuckoff wing. He leapt up from the bed with a snarl, claws out to eviscerate the intruder. There wasn’t one – just Aziraphale’s wings flapping in panic, sending the crystals of the chandelier tinkling and making the curtains snap. Just as Crowley realised what was happening Aziraphale bated right off the bed.

“Oh, shit-“ Crowley ran around the bed and gathered him up. “Aziraphale? Hey, hey. It’s all right. Just a dream.”

Aziraphale’s wings were low and still; his eyes were huge, the irises ringed with white. He looked at Crowley in astonishment, and blinked. “ _That_ was a dream?”

“Yeah. Or a nightmare. … probably nightmare.”

“But it was so real! It was like they were really here! They were right here, in the room, and you were asleep, and I- I couldn’t move! Are you _sure_? I thought- I thought dreams were like plays, or a cinematographic show!”

Crowley felt a sick anger wondering who the ‘they’ were. “No. They can feel very real. Now you know what Hamlet was so worried about.”

“And humans do this every night?” Aziraphale was still looking around the room; he reached out to touch the carpet, the quilt hanging off the bed.

“A lot of them. Pinch yourself.” He said it carefully, casually, and his heart sank when Aziraphale immediately pinched the back of his hand. “The mastic’s still… Traditional way to see if you’re still dreaming.”

He looked out of the window. It was light, with the clear brightness that promised a glorious day; last night, they’d left the curtains open. “Do you want to get up? Have some breakfast?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Feel ill.”

“Right. Want to try sleeping again?”

Aziraphale shook his head more forcefully.

“All right. I’ll run you a glass of water, yeah? You’re probably still dehydrated…” He went into the bathroom to fetch it and stared at himself in the mirror. He didn’t know what to _do_.

He helped Aziraphale to drink, and got him back into the bed. He said he’d find something on the television. He turned to ITV3 in the hope of _Miss Marple_ ; he got _Inspector Morse_ instead, and the little box at the bottom told him the episode was called _The Infernal Serpent_. He switched to one of the Channel 4 ones, and then, when he looked back, Aziraphale was asleep again.

He felt strangely abandoned. But more than that, he felt worried that Aziraphale was still tired enough and ill enough to fall asleep without wanting to.

He _ought_ to wake him up. Aziraphale didn’t want to sleep.

Instead, he spun a nice dream about picnics at Glyndbourne – it was a rush job, but Aziraphale wouldn’t know the difference.

And if he’d had to watch Aziraphale be so confused and scared for a minute longer he’d have gone mad with grief.

Part of him wanted to open a line to Heaven and tell them that he’d burn every fucker they sent down. But he didn’t want them to see how messed up Aziraphale was. No. Let Naqamiel’s death speak for itself. Retain a little mystery.

He lay down on the bed and just watched Aziraphale sleeping. His wings were limp, like a young bird’s. Crowley would have to manifest some clothes for him. Think about that, he told himself. Much better to think about that.

He toyed with the idea of tracksuit bottoms and t-shirts with _beboppers_ on them, just for the amusement the idea of Aziraphale’s chagrin engendered. What had Aziraphale looked best in? He’d always looked quite good in a toga or himation. He still sometimes stood like he had a _sinus_. It had always been handy for keeping a tablet or a scroll in; codices were a bit too heavy.

He’d had a wonderful outfit that time in 1793: silver shoes, dusky pink, plenty of lace. That had suited him. Maybe a little pink. Aziraphale hadn’t worn pink in _ages_ and it flattered him. Couldn’t have pink and beige, urgh: no, rose and dove grey. A little velvet somewhere.

Oh, the _banyan_. Aziraphale had _loved_ that banyan. He’d worn it for most of the 1700s. Powder blue woven with pale gold. Very him. When he’d worn the clamys it had been blue with gold _tablia_ , but that had been too dark, too heavy. The justaucorps had been better than the doublet.

Couldn’t go wrong with a chiton. Then Crowley could look at his arms, and his legs, and his _neck_.

No, no, far too dangerous a thought. But now all he could think of was Aziraphale’s neck. The way his fingers had massaged that parchment-white hair. The way his neck had gleamed under the water. The smell of the shampoo which Crowley had used himself.

Aziraphale had started to use perfume or cologne as soon as possible, to disguise the fact that he didn’t smell of anything human. He smelt of rain in the air, or of the electricity before a thunderstorm, but not of a normal human body. Most people were too clever to actually notice this, but the reptilian hindbrains God had given them (apparently just for shits and giggles) noticed that something was _wrong_ about him. Then he had just smelt of perfume or a pomander, and the unease people felt around him went away (or, more accurately, intensified due to any of the other things he said or did). Aziraphale preferred to go through the world without much attention, and certainly without causing more awkwardness than he did just on account of who he was as a person-shaped being.

Crowley preferred not to wear perfume or cologne. Demons generally liked people to feel uneasy and wrong-footed around them.

Would Aziraphale grow his hair long now? In a way Crowley hoped he didn’t. He wouldn’t be able to cope. He thought the angel would _enjoy_ it, though. But only… Only if Crowley were to plait it and style it for him. Left to his own devices, Aziraphale looked bookish and absent-minded because he was, fundamentally, bookish and absent-minded. He never combed his own hair. He certainly didn’t groom his own wings.

No… He went to a barber, who cut hair that didn’t grow, and shaved stubble that was created for the occasion. Did he create ridges in his own nails too, lengthen his own cuticles, so that he’d have something to deplore when he went to his manicurist? Maybe a hangnail on occasion, to justify the little ritual?

All that subterfuge – certainly a frivolous use of his powers! – and _why?_ Crowley could see the answer and didn’t want to look it in the eye, but the more he tried to avoid thinking about it the stronger it became, and he swirled around it like he was in that sodding incantation bowl again.

Because he was lonely. Aziraphale was lonely.

So he paid humans to touch him.

He paid humans to groom him.

Crowley stared at Aziraphale’s wings like he was burning a promise into them, and then magicked a hundred milligrams of temazepam into his hand.

*

“Crowley? Crowley…? Oh, just leave him be, you fusspot- _Crowley_! You’re awake!”

“Ngh,” Crowley said, and reluctantly emerged from the warm darkness of a no-go pill overdose. “Mm?”

“Sorry to wake you,” Aziraphale said, looking relieved and not sorry in the least. “I think I had another dream – we were at Glyndebourne, and the evening opera was about to start; you said you’d wanted to go into the garden, and I couldn’t find you anywhere. We were going to be late and I’d lost you…”

“Nnrrr,” Crowley said, feeling a nasty squirm of guilt. He reconstituted some of the hypnotic and coughed up a couple of the pills. “Bleugh. ‘S fine. Just a dream. Wish I could go off and not have to listen to it…”

“Don’t be so cheeky, I know how much you love Glyndebourne. ... I’m sorry I slept the day away.”

“Nah. It’s good for you.” He rubbed his eyes, and frowned in thought. The sun was low and orange through the windows. “Tap your head.”

“What? Why?”

Crowley sighed in relief, and leant back against the padded headboard. “What is this rank disobedience? You have your orders, angel!”

Aziraphale’s face scrunched up in confusion, and then cleared. “Oh!”

Crowley smiled at him. “I’m going to throw it away. I’ll do your wings without it if it takes all night. How do you feel?”

Aziraphale was looking him so tenderly; Crowley saw it take a second for the question to filter through. “Um. Shaky. It’s like a bad hangover.”

“Essentially is. And the wings?”

“Sore.” He finally relaxed and leant sidelong against the headboard.

“They will be.” Crowley reached around and groped for the room service menu on the bedside table. “Let’s get some dinner. That’ll make you feel better.”

“No, I’m not hungry.”

Crowley glanced at him over the top of the menu. Aziraphale did this; when he was feeling upset he’d eat something full of butter, but when he was particularly vulnerable he’d not eat at all. He’d try to retreat into being a _good angel_ again. “Not even for obsiblue prawns with Osetra caviar? Not even for a loin of venison in a sloe gin sauce?

“… that does sound quite good, actually.”

“Oh, or braised ox cheeks and truffled creamed potatoes…”

“All right, yes, if _you’re_ hungry,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley beamed at him.

“I’ll ring down and tell them to bring up some fizz to start with. Oh, and what would you like, angel? Orange juice? Sparkling water? You’re dehydrated, remember? Very poorly. Not allowed any alcohol.”

“Golly, I must have slept for longer than I thought if you’ve managed to gain a medical degree, Doctor Crowley.”

“I studied medicine at Bologna.”

“You got very drunk in Bologna a few times. That does not a physician make.”

“Uh, yeah, it does. I’ll tell you what, we’ll ask for some orange juice, and you can have _one_ glass of Buck’s Fizz. Or a wine spritzer. Just to taste.”

The face Aziraphale made at him gave Crowley more energy than the sleep and the thought of dinner combined.

He ordered champagne and some red wine, if they were going to be having venison. He gave Aziraphale the armchair with the low back, pulled up to the table. He turned on the television to give them something to complain about (one week since Nothing Happened and the World Definitely Didn’t End) and then waited at the door like a sentry, one eye to the spyhole.

He marked that Aziraphale still jumped at the knock, even through Crowley had said someone was coming.

Right.

Food and drink deposited and waiter tipped, Crowley locked the door again and sat down. Aziraphale had ignored the mineral water and was pouring the champagne with both hands around the bottle. His shoulders must have been incredibly stiff. “He must think I’m a terrible layabout, still wearing pyjamas.”

“You have _wings_ , Aziraphale.” Crowley snapped his fingers and changed the clothes he had slept in into black silk pyjamas to match Aziraphale’s blue. “Speaking of which, after dinner, I’ll tidy them up for you.” Aziraphale looked up at him in surprise, and nearly spilled the Moët. Crowley assumed a posture of nonchalance. “Are they dry?”

“Just about, I think. I haven’t had them out for this long for years and years.”

“We’ll find a better occasion for it when they’re healed.” He dabbed one of the turquoise prawns in the yuzu sauce and swallowed it whole. He’d pissed off the chef and the waiters by asking them for all the dishes at once. This of course would compromise the chef’s artistic vision, but Crowley didn’t give a fuck. “Mm. Holiday.”

“That would be lovely,” Aziraphale said, with a very thoughtful look.

Crowley remembered suddenly that he had promised that they would talk about the anguished declarations of love once the mastic had worn off; he called Past Crowley a selfish fucking weasel bastard in his head and scrambled for a topic of conversation. “Have you _really_ never had a dream? I thought you’d been in loads of dreams. You said that you could never get Joseph to do anything unless he was dreaming.”

“Which Joseph? Jacob’s Joseph or Mary’s Joseph? Aren’t these prawns the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen?”

“Mary’s.” Watching Aziraphale eat, he realised far too late, was _not_ going to help in distracting him from the whole _declarations of love_ issue.

“Right, yes. I thought it gave a kind of neutral ground if you needed to get to the point of the matter and they weren’t very receptive. Or dense. Go in, do the usual-“

Crowley scented blood. “Do the usual?”

“You know.” Aziraphale raised his right hand, and touched his ring finger to his thumb in benediction. He looked suitably solemn, and his hair began to glow with white light, and shift in an invisible breeze. “Behold! Mortal, be not afraid!” He waved his hand so that the palm now faced Heaven, and touched his middle finger to his thumb in the old _exordium_ gesture. “I bear tidings from On High. You know. Well, really, Crowley!”

Crowley was bent over in his chair in apoplectic laughter. “Yeah, wasn’t the clue in the _be not afraid_?”

“Yes, but I thought it was just traditional. I thought they’d _know_ it was a vision. Oh, I feel quite bad now. I’d have been more subtle if I realised.”

“No, no,” Crowley said between snickers. “I think you did great. The posing definitely makes you far less intimidating.”

Aziraphale gave him a glare that would have withered Eden itself.

“Go on. Look, I’ll take a nap, and you can pop in. Private performance. I want to see it with all the special effects.”

Aziraphale’s lip had quirked. “Do shut up.”

“I’ll give you notes. Go on, _please_. I’ll tell you which Shakespearean actor you’re most like.”

“You are incorrigible.”

Crowley felt the giddiness that came from being about to play an absolutely unbeatable card; he watched Aziraphale hungrily. “You’re Romeo Coates.”

Aziraphale didn’t disappoint. Crowley _saw_ him recognise the name, and rifle through his memories. He _saw_ Aziraphale recalling where he knew the name from. He _saw_ the remembered hilarity of the performance they had seen together – they had both laughed until they wept, Aziraphale helpless in their box and Crowley having chest pains. “Oh, now you’re just being unkind!” Aziraphale was making that face which Crowley so adored – the expression of prim offence which was about to shatter into laughter at any second. He felt drunk with love for him. “Besides, wasn’t Coates one of _yours_? ‘While I live I’ll _Crow_ ’?”

Crowley wagged his finger. “Ah, no no, no changing the subject. Wait, wait, wait, the gestures – did you have a _rhetoric tutor_?”

“Unlike _some people here_ I actually cut a respectable figure in Roman society! Speaking of which, I want to appreciate these prawns-”

“Who was it?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Was it Hortensius?”

“Of course it wasn’t Hortensius – you are _actually_ insufferable, do you know that? _Literally_ insufferable, and you know I don’t use that word carelessly.”

“Was it Molon?”

“I wish – _no_ , Crowley, I said I’m not telling you.”

“It was Hegesias.”

“I’m not telling you!”

“Oh, Go- _Fuck_ , it was Hegasias, wasn’t it? It was!”

“It wasn’t.”

“You’re _lying_ ,” Crowley said with glee.

“Angels don’t lie.”

“Angels lie constantly. Don’t forget, I’ve seen you talking to customers. You have zero plausible deniability here.”

“Oh, yes, but _customers_. They’re like pedestrians.”

“Oh, no. I know you think of customers as people.” His brain skidded right into the brick wall of Naqamiel possessing the body of the young woman. He quickly topped up Aziraphale’s half-drunk champagne. “Anyway, to return to the much more important topic, doctor’s orders.”

Aziraphale ate all the prawns, and tasted both the venison and the potatoes. He tried just one mouthful of the braised ox cheek. Crowley’s meals went half-finished, which was a bad omen in and of itself, but for _Aziraphale_ to have left pieces of food uneaten was the real danger sign.

It made Crowley feel angry and helpless and then angry again. He drank more than his share of the champagne and got started on the wine. He looked at Naqamiel’s handbag, and the pile of feathers on the desk, and felt tired despite the long sleep.

“What are we going to do about these?” he said, gathering up the large sheath. The largest was nearly a metre long.

Aziraphale sighed. He swirled some of his potato in the jus. “I don’t know. The safest thing would be to burn them.”

“No.”

“I’ll do it myself, when I’m alone. You won’t have to smell it,” Aziraphale said softly.

“Oh, and when exactly are you planning on being alone?” Crowley pinched the bridge of his nose. Old habits died hard. “I just meant…”

“I know. It’s not urgent, my dear. Perhaps we can give them to Anathema. You said she was a witch, so she’ll know about occult – or ethereal – things. Preternatural things. And she seemed very sensible. She could get rid of them for us.”

“You think that if we handed her a box full of extremely powerful magical items she’d happily just burn them? Nah,” Crowley said. He chewed the inside of his cheek.

“We’ll think of something. Find a swan’s nest and hide them there.”

Crowley scoffed and drained his glass of wine. “It’d have to be a bloody enormous swan.”

“Well, we’ll…” Aziraphale said, and he suddenly looked exhausted. “I don’t _know_ , Crowley. I don’t know who we can trust. It’ll have to be just us.”

Crowley slammed his own helplessness back down into his gut with the Michelin star food and stood up. “Got a good track record so far. Come on, if you’re full, I’ll finish your wings. Might as well while we’re talking about them.”

Aziraphale now apparently had enough blood in him to blush a little. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to put you to the trouble…”

“We both know you’re rubbish at it. Besides, I want to see how they’re healing.”

Crowley hadn’t groomed someone else in over six thousand years. Yesterday, Aziraphale had been off his tits and he’d had to concentrate on alary First Aid. Today, Aziraphale was lucid (if sick) and Crowley had had nothing to do all day but torture himself with thinking.

And yet here Aziraphale was, walking around to the bed with unblinking eyes that remained fixed on Crowley. It wasn’t _fear_ , but it was something akin to it.

If Crowley hadn’t groomed anyone in six thousand years… had Aziraphale not _been groomed_ in six thousand too?

Having been up to Heaven recently he couldn’t imagine Gabriel and Sandalphon to be too happy at Aziraphale slotting into a circle with them.

But then, even worse, was the thought that he _had_. It wasn’t jealousy he felt. It was protectiveness. Having seen the way Gabriel spoke to ‘Aziraphale’ he couldn’t imagine a wing-grooming would be a particularly pleasant interaction.

And then his stomach really did rise up to his throat and then drop back down to his hips.

Had anyone groomed Aziraphale’s wings since he lost his other pair? No. Since Naqamiel had _cut off_ his other pair?

*

Aziraphale sat cross-legged on the bed, feeling strangely, oddly jittery. It was the same kind of nervous excitement he felt every time he went to his barber or manicurist; the knowledge that someone would touch him, the fear that that contained, and the trust in the ritual and rules that made it safe.

This ritual was far, far older.

And there was no rules to keep him safe. None ever spoken, anyway, and he had placed himself in a new world. Their own side. Their own rules. Instead, he placed all of his trust, along with the most intimate and vulnerable parts of him, in Crowley’s hands.

So when Crowley got up and went into the bathroom without a word, his gaze followed him. There was a hot spike of panic in his chest, edged with hurt and embarrassment, but then Crowley reappeared with one of the towels.

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at him.

Crowley raised an eyebrow back, and then grabbed a handful of cubes out of the champagne ice-bucket.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, and buried his burning face in the pillow.

“You have a filthy mind, angel,” Crowley said, with a soft, delighted fondness. He sat down on the bed behind him. “You okay?”

“Yes. Yes. Of course, my dear.” He sat up and took a deep breath. Crowley parted some of his feathers to begin to numb the burnt flesh, and he hissed.

“Sorry. They’ll feel better soon. … I could try healing them.”

Aziraphale looked over his shoulder. In his peripheral vision, Crowley looked unsure. It made him look young.

“If you have the energy. Worth a shot.”

“Worth a shot,” Crowley said, and touched his saddle joint.

It felt nothing like Naqamiel’s rough healing, or like Crowley’s healing of his human body. It hurt. A lot. It felt like getting into a very hot bath – the flash of pain, but then, _then_ , the heat sinking down, pulling conscious thought with it. Aziraphale groaned at the relief of it.

“… well. What’dya know?” Crowley said softly. “Want me to do the others?”

“Yes. Please,” Aziraphale said. He clenched his hands in his lap, gritting his teeth at every new healing. Three on his right wing, four on his left. But then it was done, and his wings felt stiff with shiny new skin, and he could relax.

But Crowley’s hands were still in his feathers.

He scratched at the healed skin, and at the joints. His clever, long fingers scratched every nook and cranny, in the places where Aziraphale had itched for a thousand years. Itches never sated, only forgotten. Only distracted from. Crowley’s fingers at the base of his wings, on the long, jagged scars beneath them, loosening the knots in the muscles there.

He was lying on his side when he came back to himself; Crowley was reclining in his elbow behind him, still scratching vigorously. Low muscles behind his hips relaxed. One of his wings was shaking.

God only knew what he’d been saying. If he’d been _saying_ anything.

“That is,” he attempted, and swallowed. “That is just.”

“Good?” Crowley said. There was, surprisingly, _worryingly,_ no insecurity in his voice. A hint of smugness, which he had more than earned.

“That is the _best_ … God. That felt amazing.” The words didn’t do it justice.

“Good,” Crowley said, and buried his hands in the feathers again.

This time he massaged the neglected muscles, and rearranged feathers. Smoothing them down. Preening the vanes until they gleamed. Aziraphale lay on the bed, utterly unable to move.

He wasn’t tired. He’d never slept so much before in his life. But he felt completely relaxed.

He hadn’t felt like this since before the World was born. Since before the Fall. That had been the moment in which all their innocence had been lost, and Aziraphale, exiled and isolated, had never had a chance to relearn even a measure of it. To relearn that companionable trust and animal instinct. He had almost forgotten it was there. The memory of it had calcified to become something small and painful, something lodged behind the sternum. “Crowley. My Crowley. That was…”

He had been so anxious. Crowley had promised that they would discuss those cosmos-shaking words of yesterday, and then they _hadn’t_. But Aziraphale’s anxiety had been soothed away, but Crowley’s loving hands, and now by his loving eyes. It was now the easiest and simplest thing in the world to reach up and stroke Crowley’s cheek, to laugh because he was too relaxed to sit up, to lazily capture Crowley’s hand and press kisses to it. “That was…”

Crowley smiled down at him so tenderly, eyes honey-gold. “Ineffable?”

Aziaphale laughed, and kissed the inside of Crowley’s wrist. “I was going to say that was like home again.”

Crowley cocked his head to the side, and his eyes were narrow. Aziraphale pulled him down and hooked one ankle behind Crowley’s knee to anchor him. He kissed Crowley’s cheek, and then they were both kissing: first shy, then the same astonished breath, and then untamed, alight with the joy of the discovery, pressing and breathing together, hands cradling heads, fingers stroking hair.

There was a laugh in their mouths, and Aziraphale had no idea who’d started it. It felt like cool, clear water, cupped in the hands, running over. For tonight they were _safe,_ and they had rediscovered something both Heaven and Hell had lost – some purer, childlike thing that made Aziraphale’s heart sing with the complete certainty of _this one, this one,_ my _one, my Crowley._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Bating](https://youtu.be/9gr7GMfjnX8?t=19)
> 
> [Robert "Romeo" Coates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Coates_\(actor\))
> 
> [Hortensius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Hortensius)
> 
> [Molon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_Molon)
> 
> [Hegesias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegesias_of_Magnesia)
> 
> The hand positions Aziraphale uses are examples of [Chironomic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chironomia) gestures.


	12. Visitation

Crowley had no idea how long they kissed for. There was a soft blue light around Aziraphale; eventually they pulled apart, but only so that they could study each other’s faces, gaze at their entwined hands. That’s what they were doing now, as they hadn’t in Eden, trying to remember names for every bone, every muscle. Aziraphale had brought his wings back in so that he could lie against the pillows. Crowley lay with his head on the perfect pillow of Aziraphale’s abdomen; Aziraphale’s fingers lazily traced shapes in his hair.

“They’re called phalanges.”

“They’re definitely not. That’s a thing in a plane.”

“In an aeroplane? … maybe in the wing? If the wings are structured like ours. But that still suggests I’m right.”

“Definitely not. It’s a joke in a television show, not a real thing.”

“Okay then, Doctor Crowley, what are they called?”

“… Only know in Italian.”

“In Latin, they’re called _phalanges_.”

“No, in Latin, phalanges are called phalanges. I was in one once. I mean, it was a Greek one, but the same thing.”

“That’s why. It’s a metaphor. All the little finger bones together like infantrymen.”

“… don’t see it. Typical bloody humans. Why not just call them finger bones?”

“Because there’s three in each finger.”

“Yeah, so? First, second, third. Big, medium, little. … what about the thumb?”

“Oh. Um. Well, we’ve only got two in them.” Aziraphale wiggles Crowley’s thumb to demonstrate.

“Er, yes, even I can get that, thanks. It’s only the numbers after four that I lose track of. But which one is the thumb missing? Which of the phalanges?”

“Ha!”

“Which bloody _finger bone_ , angel?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one who went to medical school.”

“Before dissections were a thing.* Urgh. How do you know so much about finger bones anyway?”

(*Untrue. Dissections had been going on for some years already. Crowley had not known this, though, which was why he only lasted six lectures.)

“Can’t really remember,” Aziraphale said, after a second of thought. “Who does your nails?”

“ _Who does my_ \- no one does my nails!”

“They’re just really lovely. Very smooth.”

Crowley shifted, and tried to look at them without _obviously_ looking at them. “… really?”

“Mm, yes. I always liked that thing you can do where they go all long.”

He snorted. “Really? I remember you being on the receiving end of them a couple of times.”

“I mean, yes, obviously they’re not marvellous when they’re buried in my chest, but I always thought they’d be very convenient for back-scratching.”

This summons visions that Crowley puts a pin in for later. “Well, you only need ask.”

“Oh, you,” Aziraphale said. “Though what you did with my wings was just… I was about to say _heavenly_ but really, it was far better. It felt sinfully good. … I keep mine shorter, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do yours as well as you did mine.”

Crowley looked up Aziraphale’s chest at him. “Only one way to find out.”

Aziraphale’s face was like a star. “May I? You wouldn’t mind?”

Crowley rolled his eyes, kissed Aziraphale’s blunt fingertips, and pushed himself up. “You’re the one who’d be doing _me_ the favour.”

“Oh, no – my turn, my turn,” Aziraphale says, prodding Crowley into position. His arms snaked around Crowley’s back, and touched the buttons of his pyjama shirt. Just touched, not undid.

Crowley stroked one of his hands, and guided them into undoing his buttons. “It’ll be so good to stretch. We’ve going to have to absolutely comb this place for feathers, you know.”

Aziraphale tossed the shirt over one of the plush armchairs. He wriggled his fingers, like he did when warming up for his magic act, and Crowley laughed. It felt easy, then, to unfurl his wings. It was _Aziraphale_. Not some terrifying unknown entity. Just silly, lovely Aziraphale.

“Oh, beautiful,” Aziraphale breathed out, and then Crowley felt his hands on his wings – hesitant, then firm. Even though he was prepared for it, and Aziraphale had touched him with understanding, Crowley jerked.

Six thousand years is a long time.

They both paused, and Crowley’s wings stretched up and out into the new physical space. Crowley could feel the warmth of Aziraphale on his bare skin at his back, and he exhaled.

For the next few minutes, Aziraphale worked silently – or without talking, at least. He hummed a little song, one without melody: little sounds of delight or concentration. Crowley was unspeakably grateful. The sensation of being the entire focus of the angel was almost overwhelming; the sensation of gentle, kind touch to the most vulnerable part of him, complete acceptance, complete care… that was genuinely overwhelming.

When he felt able to speak again he cleared his throat. “Haven’t groomed them in a while. What with everything.”

“You wouldn’t know it!” Aziraphale replied instantly, with sincere admiration. “You’re _gorgeous_. Your feathers are in the most wonderful condition. Has… has anyone groomed them…?”

“No, not since before… No one is Hell would do it. I know better than to ask. And it’s so crowded, everyone pushing, everything dank… well, you’ve seen it for yourself.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said softly behind him. His touch in Crowley’s coverts was very gentle.

“Started doing it myself when I came up here. But you… I mean, you can’t have _not_ groomed them in six thousand years. You wouldn’t be able to fly. If you were a bird a vet would shoot you.”

Aziraphale laughed. “I don’t think they _shoot_ birds, my dear. Outside of a hunt or something. No, they were, um. They were groomed a few times.”

The passive tense sent alarm bells ringing. “You didn’t do it yourself?”

“No – I ought to have, but I… don’t know why I didn’t. Very silly of me.”

“No,” Crowley said. You had to go against angelic instinct to start looking after your own feathers. That was an easier thought. That was more bearable than the other thought that presented itself. “Who…?”

“Oh. Gabriel, usually. A few times. Never like this, obviously. It was a social thing, before the Um, but after… If I had to go up, or Gabriel was down for something. He said I was letting the side down. ‘ _About turn, wings out_ ,’ you know Gabriel. Better just to stand still and let him get on with it, let him do them as he wanted.”

There was something about wing-grooming that was conducive to this sort of conversation. The intimacy and vulnerability and trust, without the pressure of eye-contact, perhaps.

It also helped that Aziraphale couldn’t see Crowley’s clenched fists, and Crowley couldn’t see whatever bland expression Aziraphale was wearing while he recounted this.

“It’s not the same,” Aziraphale continued softly, “if it’s something _done_ to you. That’s not the point of it. It feels wrong. Gabriel’s wings were always perfect, obviously; though even if they weren’t, could you imagine him asking _me_ to touch them? Yours are already beautiful, and I’m probably going to mess them more than tidy them, but it’s… it’s kind of you, to let me. Does it… How does it feel?”

“Perfect,” Crowley choked. “It feels perfect, angel. Don’t worry about that. I’d rather have them messy from… from you, that neat from combs. Always.”

“All right,” Aziraphale said, and seemed to take confidence from this. “It’s funny – I haven’t done this for so long, but one’s fingers just know what to do. Your feathers are stunning – iridescent.”

“Like bees’ wings,” Crowley said, remembering.

“Yes – yes, just like that! Shiny, a little bit of blue in the darkness … you’d tell me, if you didn’t like it?”

“Yes, of course I would – when have I ever passed up an opportunity to complain?” He reached a hand around his back. “Don’t be stupid.”

He felt Aziraphale touch his hand, and then return to the grooming. “All right.” He sounded happier.

Aziraphale had been right, he couldn’t scratch itches like Crowley could. But Crowley had become very used to scratching his own itches, and instead Aziraphale’s hands were so soft, wandering, wondering. As though Crowley was something fragile, and precious.

He luxuriated in it, and by the end he was lying on his front, stretching out his wings in lazy happiness. Aziraphale placed a kiss on his back, between his wings. “Shall I cinch them in for you?”

“I’ll do them in a second. Nice to get the air on them.”

“All right.” Aziraphale went to the table and ate a mouthful of the abandoned venison. “Mm. That is delicious. What time is it? I was thinking of ordering another bottle of champagne, but I don’t want to wake anyone up…”

“Just ring and ask for two, angel. There’ll be someone available all night. Better be, with what they’re charging.” Crowley grinned to himself as Aziraphale obeyed. The humans would probably think they’ve emerged after a marathon sex session. They wouldn’t have a clue that this was so much better.

Well, going from his past experiences. With Aziraphale, there was suddenly a vast new universe to explore.

The bed creaked a little as Aziraphale climbed back on with him again. “There. I feel like a new creature, my dear – I didn’t realise how much those burns hurt.”

“You look better.” Still a little wan, still a little worn, but that awful blankness had gone from Aziraphale’s eyes. Instead, love shone in them and from them.

“I feel it. Thanks to you,” Aziraphale said, with a kiss for Crowley’s hair. He still starts a little when the knock on the door announces the champagne, and Crowley brings his wings in. “No, no, it’s all right, darling. I’ll get it.”

“Mmm,” Crowley said, cheek on his crossed arms. No point in hiding the blush that _darling_ had conjured when he wasn’t wearing a top. “Could get used to this.”

“Well, we might,” Aziraphale said cheerfully, and opened the door.

It was not the champagne.

Crowley sensed it, the build-up of power like static electricity. In an instant his wings were in, and he rolled off the bed silently. Aziraphale stood in front of the door, right arm out ramrod-straight to warn Crowley to keep back. “Gabriel. Uriel. … Sandalphon.”

_Shit! Shitshitshitshits_ hit! Crowley didn’t even reach for Naqamiel’s gun. There would be absolutely no point, against three archangels.

“Aziraphale,” he heard Gabriel say from the corridor, and Crowley’s hair stood on end. He should have burnt the fucker when he had the chance.

“Hm.” Aziraphale was white above his neatly buttoned pyjama shirt. He was looking up, eyes huge, and frozen still. He tried again. “Hm. Forgive me if I don’t invite you in. How- how did you-?”

“Find you? We were in England, and I heard someone using my name in vain. Now, why would we be in England, Aziraphale?”

“… tourism?”

“Hilarious,” Gabriel spat.

“Utterly,” Crowley heard Uriel add.

Back to Gabriel. “We’re going to have plenty of time to hear all your stupid little jokes Upstairs. Come out.”

Aziraphale was still desperately gesturing for Crowley to remain out of sight. Bollocks to that. He slithered up behind the angel.

Gabriel, flanked by Uriel and Sandalphon. “Well, well, well. Perfect.” Gabriel looked back at Aziraphale. He lifted his finger to point at the lintel. It was shaking in anger, and Aziraphale’s eyes were fixed on it. “Your work?”

“No.” Crowley’s arm snaked around Aziraphale’s neck, and he rested his chin on the angel’s shoulder. He could feel Aziraphale shaking. Crowley was wearing his pyjama bottoms low around his hips, and absolutely nothing else. His incisors grew into fangs, and he grinned. “ _Mine_.”

Uriel was the one who looked surprised by this; Gabriel barely seemed to understand what Crowley had just said. His mouth was twisted in disgust. “Well, that didn’t take long, did it? It looks like we can add _lust_ to the gluttony, cowardice, treachery-“

“Yes, yes – if we go on listing each other’s sins we’ll be here all night.” Aziraphale was trembling, but his voice was steady. “I hope you didn’t come out of your way.”

Sandalphon smashed his hand against the doorpost; Aziraphale jumped, but held firm. As did the lintel. What was that? Crowley thought hysterically. Force? Intimidation? … frustration?

“We’re here,” Gabriel bit out, “about Naqamiel.”

“Naqamiel?” Aziraphale said airily, looking up at the lintel as though her name was written on the underside. “Naqamiel – I haven’t seen her in… oh. Thousands of years.”

“Since your demotion. Since you lay screaming and begging for our mercy,” Sandalphon said.

That was what Naqamiel had said. That Aziraphale had screamed, and begged, and Crowley had heard the spiteful glee in her voice. The same tone rang in Sandalphon’s voice, even the same bloody _words_ , and Crowley could hear six thousand years of tittering reminisces. A story told over and over again, until it was always told in the same words, every time. The solidification of an oral tradition. _That Time We Mutilated Aziraphale And He Embarrassed Himself._

Crowley wanted to duck under the lintel and tear the petty, vicious bastards limb from limb, every one of them. He must have hissed, because Aziraphale put an arm out to hold him back.

Instead, Aziraphale sighed out. His shoulders relaxed. His trembling fell away with a single last shudder, and he was still. Crowley could almost hear the wheels turning in Aziraphale’s head. “Yes. Yes, you’re quite right. That was it.” He sounded like he was remembering someone he’d met at an art exhibition opening whose name he had forgotten, and he didn’t care who knew it. “In the Judgement Theatre. Gosh.”

“She’s _dead_.”

“What a shame,” Aziraphale said in a monotone. “I felt _one_ of Us die, but I didn’t know it was her.”

“You’re not _one of Us,”_ Uriel snapped out.

“Well, not in _feeling_ , no… but if I’m remembering the Judgement Theatre correctly now that Sandalphon has kindly jogged my memory, you said yourself, Gabriel, that it was God’s choice if I Fell, and if I _didn’t_ … that meant I remained one of You.” Aziraphale looked back at Gabriel. Crowley looked too. He made an exaggerated face of innocent confusion.

Gabriel was now pointing his finger right at Aziraphale’s nose. “Aziraphale. Let us in.”

It reminded Crowley, forcefully, of the attempted execution. “Up,” Uriel said as they pulled away the bindings, and Crowley had known that Aziraphale would stand. “Into the flame,” Gabriel had said, and just… _expected_ Aziraphale to do it. There had been no threats, no weapons. They had just… known Aziraphale would do what they said, even unto his own extinction. Gabriel had been _angry_ that ‘Aziraphale’ would even offer some polite final words instead of immediately obeying.

He thought of Aziraphale making a report about what he had learnt about mastic, and Heaven using that against him. Obedience unto death. Aziraphale had wanted to kill himself before the execution, and Crowley had been _so furious_. Aziraphale had wept, and Crowley had snarled that if either shower of bastards wanted to end them they’d have to come and _try it_. They weren’t going to do their dirty work for them anymore.

“No.”

“Aziraphale!”

“No, Gabriel. It’s really not up to me. If Crowley wrote the Shaddai then I can’t _erase_ it, can I? It _does_ rather suggest that you might mean to do either of us harm if you can’t step over the threshold.” Crowley felt Aziraphale take a deep breath to steady himself. “I mean, I wouldn’t let you in even if it _was_ my choice, but-“

“You stupid little sod!” Gabriel suddenly shouted. “Come out. Come out here, right now!”

“You can’t _bully_ me anymore, Gabriel,” Aziraphale said. “You tried to burn me alive. You tried to obliterate me, with no trial, no- You can’t step back to being a _bully_ after _attempted murder_ -“

“Of course you can. It’s easy,” Sandalphon said, and darted in a feint at Aziraphale.

Crowley felt Aziraphale tense, but he stood firm, and didn’t step back. Crowley saw Sandalphon come up short.

He widened his eyes. He wanted Sandalphon to know that he had seen it.

“I mean that you can’t bully me because I don’t give a- a _fig_ what you think of me.” He looked back up at Gabriel. “And you can’t kill me now either. You can’t kill Crowley. We’re both immune to hellfire and holy water. By your own admission you can’t make me Fall, so… you don’t have any power over me anymore. The only power you _did_ have was to demote me, which you’ve already done, and you can’t do it again because I’m not your soldier anymore, and my good opinion of you. And- And my good opinion once lost, is lost, well, for quite a long while at least.”

“You think that _we_ demoted you?” Uriel said. “That that was us _bullying_ you? You really are the most ridiculous angel ever created.”

“We just carried out the order,” Gabriel said. His purple eyes were fixed in Aziraphale. “That order came from the top. She told us Herself. That you were to be demoted to Principality if she didn’t see fit to make you Fall.”

Crowley could _feel_ Aziraphale’s heart dropping as though they were still in each other’s bodies. He pressed against Aziraphale’s back, so he could feel his closeness. “I don’t believe you.”

Suddenly all three angels became completely transparent. The Voice of God echoed around the room; this was _Her_ Voice, before old Enoch ascended to Heaven and became the Metatron. Crowley bent over with a shout of pain, head about to burst with the violent bliss of it; he felt Aziraphale shove him down, curl his body around his head to shield him. Crowley’s hands were over his ears, and Aziraphale’s hands over Crowley’s. It helped, a little – he could _hear_ Her, still, but the life of Aziraphale around him provided a measure of protection.

_I no longer wish for Aziraphale to be at My side. His actions in the Garden were not those of My courtier or My guard. Send him to the humans instead._

Crowley blinked, and came back to himself. He felt as though his head was full of blood. He looked up in a daze, and the three angels, opaque again, stared down at them, huddled together on the floor. “See?” said Gabriel. He was grinning. “No friends Up There, Aziraphale. This little trick of your demon boyfriend is just standard human superstition, and you can’t mark every door.”

Aziraphale was still cradling Crowley’s head to his chest. “No,” he said. “No, maybe not. That was… that was Her decision, if she didn’t want me with Her.”

Crowley's mind was racing. That was _it_? That was _all_? Nothing there about wings, or heads. Nothing there about demotion! Aziraphale's actions in the Garden had been those of an _ambassador_ , not an unthinking soldier. He looked at Aziraphale to see if he had noticed it, but the angel just looked resigned. A little hurt.

Sandalphon sneered. “Can you blame Her, given the company you keep when left to your own devices?”

Aziraphale shrugged. “No. I’m not responsible for Her decisions. Only my own.” He wasn’t looking at the angels, but at Crowley. “ _He who walks with the wise grows wise_.” He stood up slowly, helping Crowley, checking his ears for damage. “Here, my dear.”

“ _A righteous man is cautious in friendship, but the way of the wicked leads them astray_ ,” Uriel said with spite in their voice.

“ _Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help.”_ Aziraphale was still staring at him, and Crowley thought that if he could die of love, this would be the moment for it. He rubbed his ear, and turned around to face the angels.

“Enough!” Gabriel roared. “Enough! Cut the crap, Aziraphale. We found the barn. We found the censer. We found the circle.”

“And we found the scorchmarks. We found where the Hellfire come up,” Uriel added.

“Sounds like she messed with someone she shouldn’t have,” offered Crowley.

“Shut up, demon! Aziraphale!”

“Gabriel,” Aziaphale replied. He was frowning, now. “You can’t come in, and I won’t go out. I don’t know why you came here to ask _me_ about Naqamiel but I am afraid to say it was a wasted journey.”

“No, angel, he’s right. Cut the crap,” said Crowley gently. He looked back at Gabriel. “Woooow.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. Shook his head. Slowly. “Wow. Do you… do you lot not realise what the entire point of the ‘rogue agent assassination’ thing _is_? She’s the rogue agent, you didn’t know a thing about what she was doing, nothing to do with you. _Seriously. Guys_. We were giving you _way_ too much credit.”

The three angels stared at him.

Beside him, Aziraphale exhaled. “You weren’t thinking about plausible deniability…”

“You actually just don’t _care_. I suppose extra-judiciary killing is usually next after extraordinary rendition, but we thought you’d at least be a little more subtle about it. At least _pretend_ to be the good guys.” Crowley was smirking, but his eyes were very, very cold. “Looks like Aziraphale really was the last one to believe that at all.”

“Well, as has been said, I’m very stupid,” Aziraphale said.

“You are. Do you know what Aziraphale here said? Said that angels would never try and kill another angel, especially not without God’s permission.”

“And how do you know we don’t have God’s permission?” Uriel said.

“Because Aziraphale exorcised her back to you! He adjured her by the living God. And you just gave her another body and sent her straight back down.”

“It makes me wonder what other things you’ve assumed were the will of God because they aligned with what _you_ wanted,” Aziraphale said quietly. “I wonder… when the orders stopped coming.”

The silence that followed stretched, and Crowley’s eyes stretched with it. How long? _How long_? A thousand years? Two? _More_?

“You two,” Gabriel said, “are a pair of little _motherfuckers_ , do you know that?”

“Oh, yes,” said Aziraphale. “And as one to another, we tried to be polite. We tried to warn you. And we tried to be merciful to Naqamiel.”

Behind Aziraphale, in a way that was starting to feel altogether too familiar, Crowley was starting to grin like an idiot. “Just wouldn’t stop, though. Psycho, that one. Self-preservation instinct of a suicidal lemming. Didn’t know when to _give up_ ,” he said.

“Couldn’t take the hint. _God only knows_ why you’re finding it so difficult to kill us. But just like she made an example of me, as you all appear to remember so vividly, well, we’ve made an example of her. A word to the wise.”

“A nod’s as good as a wink,” said Crowley, offering both by way of illustration.

“Now, if you insist on having the final word, now’s your chance,” Aziraphale said politely, with his hand on the door-handle. Without breaking eye contact with Gabriel, wearing a small apologetic moue, he slowly began to push it shut.

“Don’t you dare, Aziraphale.” There was an amethyst glow in Gabriel’s eyes, and a smell like petrol. Standing behind the angel, Crowley looked from Gabriel to the gap in the door, and back to the archangel. His jaw dropped open; Aziraphale was doing it, the angel was _actually doing it_. Well, if they were going to go, he was going to enjoy his last few seconds. He turned his expression of shock into a wild exaggeration, looking back between the door and Gabriel; he goggled, covered his mouth’s perfect O of horrified surprise with his hand, pointed theatrically with the other, measuring the steadily decreasing space.

“Aziraphale!” Gabriel’s face was close to matching his eyes. “Don’t you even _think_ -“

The locked clicked home.

Crowley immediately pulled Aziraphale back in case Gabriel blasted the door apart in his fury. Aziraphale was flapping his hands as though he were trying to shake something off them – perhaps the surge of adrenaline Crowley could feel under his own skin like trapped lightning. Crowley clamped his hand over the angel’s mouth and dragged them both down behind the corner of the bed.

There was silence. It stretched.

As one, they slowly rose and peeked over the rumpled duvet.

The door remained standing, and closed.

“ _Holy_ sshit!” Crowley hissed, and punched the air in victory “Shitshitshitshit-“

“What have I done,” Aziraphale asked, with dawning horror, “what have I- language Crowley, _please_ - _“_ and Crowley grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him. Aziraphale laughed, panic-striken, into his mouth, and Crowley pulled them both up, swung Aziraphale off his feet. “Oh, God, oh-!”

“I love you, you brave, insane-“ Crowley said, in between mad attempts to kiss every inch of Aziraphale’s face.

“Oh, Crowley, I can’t believe-!“

There was a knock, and the world stopped. They stared in horror at the door.

Another knock. “Hello? Someone ordered champagne?”

Crowley made a noise like a boiling kettle, Aziraphale made a sound like a strangled cat, and that was it for both of them; they sank together, clinging desperately, and laughed until they cried.


	13. Shift

It had been four days since Anthony J. Crowley, for whom money was no object and manners were for ordinary mortals, and The Other One had arrived at the Manor House Hotel and Golf Course.

No one knew the name of The Other One. To begin with, no one actually _thought_ of him as The Other One. They had all thought of him as The Angel, but every time someone tried to articulate the thought they choked on it.

They were all any of the staff who had seen them talked about, but the odd thing was, they couldn’t _say_ anything. No one had said the word ‘wings’, after all. Laura had tried to tell her mother, but nothing had come out. She tried to write HE HAS WINGS on a piece of hotel stationary, and no ink flowed. A pencil didn’t work. Text didn’t work, or e-mail. The ones who had _seen_ the wings could speak to each other, as long as they didn’t say _what they had seen_.

Laura had been the one to check them in. She hadn’t been able to say that Anthony J. Crowley had half-carried his barely conscious friend into the lobby, and otherwise bearing only a woman’s handbag under his arm. The Other One’s hair had, at the time, been brown and red with blood and soot, and his skin was just as bad. He had been barefoot and wearing a pair of blue silk pyjamas on which new blood stains were blossoming.

And, of course, he had an enormous pair of wings.

Instead, she had shown her colleagues the CCTV footage. You couldn’t see the blood or the rictus of Anthony J. Crowley, but there they were. Wings.

She didn’t know why the _spell_ hadn’t affected the video footage. Not that it mattered. Anyone who _hadn’t_ seen the wings themselves would be convinced it was all doctored. It was just a relief to those who had.

*

On the evening of the second day they’d ordered room service. They wanted all the food sent up at the same time, which had made the head chef blow a gasket, but if he wanted to take that up with Anthony J. Crowley he was more than welcome to do so himself and leave Laura out of it. Robb had come down after delivering their room service, and had tried to communicate to Laura what he had seen in there. He grew more and more frustrated, beginning sentences which exploded into raspberries or coughing, until Laura had had the idea to ask, “Was there a swan in the room?”

Robb’s eyes lit up, and he grabbed her hands in gratitude. “Yes! Yes, there was a massive fucking swan! A SWAN. JUST SITTING THERE.”

On the third day, they came down to breakfast. They had paid for it, but had yet to appear, or even to order it to the room.

They had brought no luggage, and no deliveries had been made for them. But Anthony J. Crowley was wearing a brand new outfit, all black and achingly expensive, with sunglasses and jeans that clung to him like an oil slick. The Other One’s hair, it turned out, was _white_ , as fluffy as feathers around his head. She couldn’t see what colour his eyes were – a shifting grey, murky blue, light green. It made her head hurt. He was wearing a blue shirt, a tartan bow tie, an argyle jumper, and beige trousers.

He did _not_ have wings.

They’d ordered two bottles of Moët and Chandon in the small hours, and if they’d drunk them they were looking good for it. “Good morning, my dear,” said The Other One, with a soft RP accent. Normally the _my dear_ would have rankled. Laura would have secretly rolled her eyes at the patronising sexism and thought that being middle-aged was no longer old enough to talk like that. Normally.

But her gaydar was well tuned (it had to be, living in Wiltshire), and a gay _my dear_ was very different to a straight _my dear_. A straight _my_ dear made her roll her eyes behind her impeccable work face. A gay _my dear_ made her smile. Not that you even needed gaydar with The Other One; if he hadn’t been there with Anthony J. Crowley you’d still only need _eyes_. And this gay _my dear_ was _so_ gay it made her feel, strangely, safe. That conscious decision to be soft, perhaps. He seemed like the kind of man who called _everyone_ his dear. One of those affectations the awkward cultivated to make social encounters go a little more smoothly. Like her and _sir_. It made him feel a little more human, while the simultaneous thought that angels could be gay soothed some old, half-forgotten knot in her chest. “Is the breakfast through here?” he said with a gentle smile.

“Yes, sir – just to the left.” There was even room for some relief, that his wounds had been healed. Whatever they had been. She hadn’t been able to see him head on, after all. She only knew that he had looked like he was at death’s door, and now he didn’t. “Are you feeling better, sir?” she asked, before she could stop herself.

Anthony J. Crowley glared at her from behind those flash sunglasses, but The Other One’s face lit up, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Laura suddenly felt as though things could, possibly, far in the future, be all right with the world. She could finish her novel. The tricky ending just unwound itself in a moment of pure clarity.

“So kind,” said The Other One, with perfect sincerity on his face. “Yes – yes, I’m well on my way to recovery. I feel wonderful. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” Laura said. Strange. What she really wanted to say to him was _thank you_ in return. “Enjoy your breakfast.”

“I will! You know, as soon as I saw the salmon kedgeree on the menu that’s all I’ve been able to think about,” he added to Anthony J. Crowley as they walked through. 

“’S all you’re ever able to think about,” replied Anthony J. Crowley, and the fondness in his voice calmed Laura’s heartbeat a little.

*

Apparently that morning, the first time Anthea had been allowed in to clean, there had been a note. She brought it down to show them all. It was scrawled in terrible handwriting on the hotel stationery:

_If you see any feathers in the room, place them on the desk. Do not take one. I Will Know. – A. J. Crowley_

Laura didn’t ask her whether she’d taken one.

*

She tended to take the night shifts. Most of the other staff were grateful to her, it paid better, and she was far less busy. She could usually read through the shift, or work on her novel. All she had to give up in exchange was her ability to function in step with all her family and friends.

This evening there was a rarity: a call to the front desk at 3 am. Even rarer for this hotel, it was a noise complaint. Lots of shouting and banging coming from the room next to the Beaulieu Suite. Something had been smashed. Mr. Conybeare’s wife had been woken up, you know.

The Lordsmew Suite. Dread and curiosity warred in her, and pure human nature won out over sense. She went upstairs rather than call from Reception. Anthony J. Crowley and The Other One were talking, she could hear the murmur of voices. She knocked.

The voices stilled. One second later the door was pulled open, and there stood Anthony J. Crowley himself, in black silk pyjamas.

“Excuse me, sir,” Laura said. Anthony J. Crowley looked down at her. He was wearing sunglasses, despite it being nearly three in the morning, and the dimness of both room and corridor. “I’m afraid one of the other guests has complained about some noise… Is anything the matter?”

“Not in here,” said Anthony J. Crowley. “… I had a nightmare. That’s all. If you’d tell me which room made a complaint I’d be _delighted_ to apologise personally.”

Laura’s hair stood on end. “I’m afraid I can’t say, sir. But if they call reception again I’ll tell them that there is no reason for concern. Or complaint.”

Anthony J. Crowley quirked a smile. “Thanks ever so much. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, sir.”

She shouldn’t have done it. She should have walked straight away. But she lingered, just for a moment, and pressed her ear against the wood.

“It’s fine, Aziraphale – hey. Hey. Just the nice human from Reception. No one can get in. It’s all right.”

“But she said a _noise complaint_ \- oh, I’m so embarrassed-“

“Fuck ‘em. Come on.”

It twisted her stomach, and her brain screamed at her to remember the blood and the overwhelming smell of burning that followed them when they arrived.

_Aziraphale. Aziraphale._ She wouldn’t even be able to Google it. She couldn’t say it out loud. But she repeated the syllables over and over again, in her mind, all night long.

She asked Anthea when she next saw her what the room had been like, and whether anything had been smashed. Not a thing, she said.

*

The fifth day brought excellent gossip in the form of a request from The Other One. _Aziraphale_. The secret syllables bounced around her ribcage and caught the light. There was glorious sunshine, and Simmy, who had been on the desk during the day, said that The Other One had approached and said (“Wait, I wrote it down-”) that he and his _companion_ would like to play pall-mall on the lawn, if that was permitted.

Simmy had readily admitted to Laura that she had thought Pall Mall was a Monopoly square. She had been saved when Anthony J. Crowley had come in to find The Other One. “Problem?”

“Yes – it appears that I misunderstood, or…” The Other One had looked at Simmy, and then smiled at Anthony J. Crowley. “It seems we’re not allowed to play pall-mall.”

Simmy had looked wretchedly at them. “I can ask David if the bar has a Monopoly set, sir; if it does then you’re more than welcome to bring it outside. We can provide a picnic blanket-“

Anthony J. Crowley had snorted. “It’s called croquet now, angel.”

“Oh! Oh, you’re quite right, so it is – I am so sorry, dear lady! Would it be permissible for us to play croquet?”

Of course it had been, and they had been playing all day, drinking steadily, until they'd gone to the restaurant for dinner. Bless Simmy for writing down the conversation for them all later. The pet name would be especially seized upon – a _little_ on the nose – and neither of them missed that the pen hadn’t run out in this case, though the ink had faded significantly.

If it _was_ a pet name.

Even if it was a straightforward description, it was obviously a pet name too. By all accounts, the two men were disgustingly in love. They stared at each other. They walked hand in hand in the gardens like children. They picked flowers and tucked them behind each other’s ears. They fed the ducks on the pond. When night fell they sat in the bar and ordered drinks with no regard for money. Apparently they usually spoke in English, but occasionally switched to something – David, who worked behind the bar, swore blind that at one point they were chatting in fluent Hebrew, and another time in something that had a smattering of the same words as Hebrew but which he didn’t recognise. Mostly it was English, though.

Apparently they spent most of the night playing a drinking game with the Snakes and Ladders set. They reached the point of laughing, then slurring. They were staggering up the stairs when Laura came on duty at midnight, arms around each other to hold themselves upright.

*

Another noise complaint. Hours of silence, and then shouting and smashing in the Lordsmew Suite just before dawn. Laura said she’d let the people responsible know, put the phone down again, and did nothing.

Guests drifted down towards the restaurant, or in from the cottage suites. The Other One bounded over to wish her a very good morning, and she beamed back at him.

“Morning. Are you going to be on the desk? We’ll be back after breakfast to settle the bill,” said Anthony J. Crowley. “And we’ll need a taxi to the station in Bath.”

“Oh!” said The Other One, with such distress in his voice that both Laura and Anthony J. Crowley turned to stare at him. “Oh, are we… are we going so soon? I thought we’d have another day.”

Behind his sunglasses, Anthony J. Crowley’s face was blank, but Laura saw a muscle jump in his jaw. “Sure thing,” he said casually. “Sorry. Another day it is.”

“Yes, sir,” Laura said, matching his easy tone. “Enjoy your breakfast.”

“Thankss.” So. The infamous Anthony J. Crowley had a lisp. It wasn’t information she wanted to share, though. It seemed like he worked hard to hide it.

They were turning to go through to the restaurant when there was a shout from the stairs. “Excuse me! _Excuse_ me!”

All three of them looked.

This had to be Henry Conybeare and his wife. They never had many guests at a time. He was portly, balding, and visibly taking the opportunity to wear his poshest golfing clothes. His wife was ten years younger than him and was trying to pull him back, hissed that it wasn’t worth it, darling please, no point in making a scene-

Anthony J. Crowley leant back against the desk, giving Laura a quite obscene view of his arse. The Other One’s hands betrayed his anxiety; he wrung them, and Laura stood up. “Sir, please-“

“No – you fobbed me off!” Conybeare said, jabbing his finger in her direction. “I’ll speak to your manager later; _twice_ I’ve rung down-“

“Oh, twice?” said Anthony J. Crowley. He was grinning.

“Yes!” Conybeare puffed out his chest. “Twice now me and my wife have been woken up by you two shouting and screeching at all hours of the night! Don’t try and deny it, I waited for you to leave so I’d know exactly who was being so _rude_ , and _now_ I see it’s the- Whether it’s some _sex thing_ -“

Anthony J. Crowley barked in laughter. “Yes! Yes, that’s precisely it. _So_ sorry. This one’s just such a _demon_ in the sack, I can’t help myself. Knows just how to make me scream.”

“ _Crowley_!” The Other One said. “My dear sir, I apologise unreservedly for my friend, and for the disturbance. I promise, it won’t happen again.”

“Won’t it?” said Anthony J. Crowley. It surprised her. There was real anger in his voice now.

Conybeare was looking at The Other One with disgust quite evident on his face. He saw the twisting hands and scented weakness. “Well, that’s really not good enough, is it? Two nights of rest _ruined_ -“

“We’ve apologised,” said Anthony J. Crowley. “Take it like a good man.”

“Take it? Take it?!”

“Yeah. Take it.” Anthony J. Crowley was no longer grinning. “Then kindly fuck off with your lovely wife to breakfast, and we’ll forget about this. I’m in a forgiving mood.”

“ _You’re_ in a forgiving mood?” said Conybeare. “ _My wife_ and I have been woken up _two nights in a row_ by your completely inconsiderate hullabaloo – I’m surprised you haven’t been kicked out into the gutter where you belong for all the damage – windows smashing, banging against the wall, what are you doing? Hmm? Throwing the television around like you’re some kind of _rock star_?” he says, with an extremely disparaging look up and down Anthony J. Crowley’s outfit.

“Sir, _please_ ,” said Aziraphale. “As I said, it won’t happen again. Why don’t you let us buy you breakfast, to apologise?”

Anthony J. Crowley snorted. “You don’t have any money, angel. _I_ have all the money. And I’m not buying this prick a thing.”

Conybeare spluttered. “I have no idea what this,” he said, and gestured at both of them, “whatever _arrangement_ this is, but nobody speaks to me like that. I’m surprised that an establishment like this would even allow such-“

“Oh, shut up,” said Anthony J. Crowley. “I fucking warned you. Well, now, every single night, for the rest of your life, you’ll dream that you’re on fire, and you’ll wake up screaming.”

“Crowley!”

“Oh, all right. For a year.”

“ _No_.” The Other One was very firm.

Anthony J. Crowley appeared to look up to Heaven in exasperation. “I thought you’d _like_ it. Teaching empathy. Contrapasso.”

“’Contrapasso’ - _really_ , my dear."

Conybeare looked between them. “What on _earth_ are you _talking_ about?”

“I think it’s a curse, Henry,” his wife suddenly volunteered. Her voice was dreamy. "He was putting a curse on you."

Anthony J. Crowley cocked a finger-gun at her.

“Oh. Oh!" Conybeare was red in the face. "A bloody- What are you, _witches_ as well as _pooft_ -“

He never finished the word. With a noise somewhere between a snarl and the backdraft of a fire, Anthony J. Crowley turned into the largest black snake Laura had ever seen, like Jafar in _Aladdin_. He was so big he reared up six feet, eight feet, ten feet – his black scales rippled with a rainbow iridescence, and his belly was blood-red. The snake’s fangs were the length of Laura’s forearm, and they were both bearing down, down-

Both Conybeares were screaming. The Other One had his head in his hand.

And then there was just Anthony J. Crowley again. He turned to the desk and Laura as guests and staff ran into the lobby to see what the commotion was about; he let her see his eyes, turmeric yellow with a black slit, gave her a wink, and then slid his sunglasses back on. “Nightmares for a week,” he said affably, voice low, as he turned around again. “And that’s only because I have an angel on my shoulder.”

He flicked his hand, and Mrs. Conybeare’s face suddenly cleared. Her husband’s did not – he was goggling at Anthony J. Crowley, pointing, mouth agape. Anthony J. Crowley looked back at everyone innocently.

“I think he had a cramp,” The Other One offered up. “They can be painful as anything – tonic water helps, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. Cramp,” Anthony J. Crowley said, staring until Conybeare nodded. He, The Other One, and Laura watched as his wife led him through to the bar, and the other people moved back into the restaurant or outside.

“You are utterly incorrigible. My dear,” said The Other One. _Aziraphale_. His voice was soft and loving. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Eh. Wanted to. Flat out of patience.”

“I’ve taken up your entire store.”

Anthony J. Crowley snorted. “Nah. Just never had much in the first place. Come on. I want to try the kedgeree now you’ve gone on about it so much. Sorry about that, miss.”

“Absolutely fine,” Laura said honestly. “Genuinely not a problem. Enjoy your breakfast.”

Anthony J. Crowley grinned again. “Oh, I will. He touched his temple in a nonchalant salute to her, and The Other One – _the angel_ – waved at her as they walked through.


	14. Garden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tetelestai! Many thanks especially to tartan-thermos on Tumblr who gave me so much help in the last few chapters, particularly with the dialogue, and thank you to everyone who has read, bookmarked, given kudos, and especially commented! I've been so lucky to have some incredibly generous and kind people giving multiple comments, and being able to chat with you has been the highlight of writing this!

Crowley was sulking. After breakfast Aziraphale had gone to check on the old gammon, and was probably wiping his memory even now. What a waste.

He didn’t want to go up to their room alone. Instead he leant against the wall, smoking an illusory cigarette, so that he could hear the cadence of Aziraphale’s voice. It’s not that he needed to be _with_ him every second. He just needed to know where the angel _was_ every second.

Why didn’t he want to go back to London? This had been a very nice interlude, even if it wasn’t where Crowley would have chosen under ordinary circumstances. But Crowley was itching to go home – to go to Aziraphale’s bookshop. He doubted Naqamiel had locked up while he was in the incantation bowl. He hoped she hadn’t burnt it. The poor Bentley’s windscreen was still smashed in.

There weren’t even any _books_ here.

He heard Aziraphale chatting as he left the bar, and the imaginary cigarette disappeared from his fingers. The angel met him with a smile. “I thought you were going up?”

“Nah. Nice day. Wanna walk instead?”

“Yes – yes, why not? A little post-prandial perambulation,” Aziraphale said, with what Crowley fondly thought of as his bastard-smile. He gave the required groan and full-body eye-roll, just for the sake of tradition.

The gardens were beautiful. Flowers bloomed in a thousand colours. The dark blue sky was broken up with fluffy, pure-white clouds. Aziraphale loved it, obviously. It made Crowley sneeze.

“Here, my dear,” Aziraphale said, and bent over to pluck a white pink from the ground. “I love these – the little frilly edges. Like feathers.” He tucked it behind Crowley’s ear.

“Speaking of which,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale hummed.

“Yes. Well, I’ll bring them back with me, I think.”

Crowley looked at him, and raised his eyebrows. “Do you usually keep them after a molt?”

“No… But it feels different, now. I want to keep them.”

Something roiled deep behind Crowley’s hips. “Hmm.”

“And yours? Do you want to keep yours?”

“You have them. Make a cushion or something.” Aziraphale _blushed_. He actually _blushed_. Well, well, well. That was something interesting. “What do you want to do today?”

“Oh… Oh, I hadn’t thought. I don’t mind.”

Crowley frowned. “We could be back in London by teatime. Earlier. Late lunch.”

“Oh, hmm,” Aziraphale said, vague and noncommittal, and looked around at the grounds again.

Crowley looked around for a bench. Aziraphale was like a sodding butterfly – you needed to pin him down before you’d get anything from him. Talking to him while they walked never got them anywhere. No, he needed to sit, with some flowers or a cake or something to stare at, and then Crowley could stare at _him_.

There was a compass garden set in an odd Victorian folly – no roof, but stone neo-Gothic walls and windows, and plenty of climbing plants. A fountain in the centre. Perfect. Crowley began to steer them. “I’d rather get back to London tonight.”

“Mm. Hm. The car.”

“And your bookshop.”

“Hm. Yes. The bookshop.”

Something chimed in the back of Crowley’s head. _The body_. That’s how Aziraphale had referred to it, when Crowley was healing him. Not _my body_. _The body._

“It’ll be fine,” he said gently. He looked straight ahead, in case the eye contact spooked Aziraphale. “They’ll both be fine.”

Silence at his side. Crowley chanced a look. Aziraphale wasn’t frowning, which was a worry. He was just staring blankly at the path ahead of them.

Crowley picked up the pace. “So. What did you say to our bigot friend?”

“You really gave him a turn, you know. I apologised for the noise again, that’s all. He was beginning to think he’d imagined it. He was much more polite, though.”

“Lift the curse, did you? Wipe his memory?”

“Oh, no,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley beamed at him. “We can’t undo each other’s work. Per the Arrangement.”

_His bastard_. “Quite right, angel. Besides, it’s only a week.”

“Yes. And his wife will suddenly decide to visit her mother for a week. No need for her to be disturbed too.”

“No, indeed. This looks nice,” he said, as though they had _chanced_ across the folly and the fountain. He threw himself down onto the bench and stretched. As expected, Aziraphale primly settled beside him, like a dove coming in to roost. “Not sure about the Gothiccy bits.”

“No. It doesn’t match the fountain at all.” Aziraphale stared at it, and Crowley followed his gaze. Andalusian marble, instead of Gothic stone. In the brilliant sunlight the fountain was beautiful – a spray of a thousand glittering diamonds every second, the underside of the bowl shimmering with the reflected ripples.

They used to have fountains, in Heaven. They’d got rid of them all now. Crowley had been amazed by how bare it was. There used to be ornamentation. Golden letters set in the alabaster streets that sang when bare angelic feet touched them. Pools, and fountains. Squares where angels could sit in circles, grooming the wings of the friend in front of them.

Squares where Lucifer had stood on a marble bench, so that he could look every single listener in the eye. Crowley had felt so proud, to be noticed by an angel as magnificent as Lucifer. And then the alabaster streets had been slick, and the water in the pools stained red.

He remembered Hastiel clapping his shoulder with an encouraging smile. Handing him a spear.

He looked at Aziraphale instead of the dancing diamonds. “He upset you. That prick.”

Aziraphale sighed. “No. He didn’t upset me. I was _embarrassed_. Making such a noise that I woke him up. Twice!”

“Anyone would, after what happened.”

“Cowards would,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley scoffed. He could hear where that word had come from. It wasn’t a word that naturally fit in Aziraphale’s mouth; someone else had put it there. “I know I am. It doesn’t matter.”

“You were ready to face down Satan with me. Naqamiel didn’t do that, did she? Oh, she was very happy chasing down poor angels who’d never held a weapon before-“ He stopped himself, and exhaled. “You’re not a coward.”

“I am. I’ve been scared for as long as I can remember,” Aziraphale admitted softly to the water.

Crowley’s heart twisted, and his throat with it. “Fine. You’re a coward. I don’t _care_. It doesn’t _matter_.”

“It does. It- How long did it take me, to admit we were friends? That you were my best… the only one who…” His mouth twisted again. “I’ve been thinking, about Heaven.”

“Bad idea,” Crowley said. “Seriously. No good ever comes of it. Listen to the voice of experience.”

“I can’t stop, though. Gabriel would say it was par for the course,” Aziraphale said with a self-deprecating shrug. He still wouldn’t meet Crowley’s eyes. “She… she made me manifest my wings. I think that’s why I keep doing it when I’m asleep. She tells me to bring out my wings, and the next thing I know the lamp’s on the other side of the room. They itch now, just from _saying_ it. I want to scratch her out of them.” He didn’t quite smile at Crowley, but he dropped him a quirk of the lip. “Or ask someone to.”

“Someone? Who is he?! The bastard! I’ll kill him!” Crowley said, and Aziraphale gave a damp little chuckle that unknotted his spine somewhat.

“Oh, you.” Aziraphale was still looking at the fountain, but his fingers touched Crowley’s on the bench between them. Crowley immediately took his hand, and the set of Aziraphale’s shoulders softened slightly. “I’ve been thinking that… I should have known for much longer. And even after all this, some part of me still wants them to like me! It’s utterly absurd. I can’t believe how long it took me to…”

Crowley’s thumb ran over the angel’s knuckles. He hated to see Aziraphale twist himself in knots like this. He didn’t use to – it used to be the best entertainment going. He’d ask him about eating puffins in Lent or something and just watch him go, like a kid with a wind-up toy. Now it just made him feel hollow. “Difficult to see through a veil of fear.”

“I suppose so. But I was wilfully ignorant too. I think I’ve been scared of them for so long that I thought it was normal. I thought that was just… existence. Doubt, and anxiety. Out of step with everything, forever. And I was happy, in a way. Because I didn’t think there was anything else.”

“That’s not on you. Come on. We’re the only two who’ve learnt there’s anything more. And that’s because we’ve been around humans all this time.”

“You thought it before. You were always the one who… the adventurous one. Even in Eden. You were friendly to me… The last two days have been so… I’ve been so happy. _So happy_. And we could have _had this_ if I hadn’t been a coward.”

“No. Fuck, Aziraphale, _please_ look at me.” He almost regretted the request, because Aziraphale’s glass-green eyes mirrored the fountain. “It wouldn’t have been like this, would it? It would have been different. It was worth the wait. I promise you.”

“It might have been better.”

“It might have been _worse_. Like… Like your demotion.”

“My demotion?” If Aziraphale’s wings had been out they would have fluffed in outrage at this point. Crowley took his sunglasses off despite the bright light, so Aziraphale could see his sincerity.

“Your demotion. I mean, I can imagine how horrible it was. I don’t know if I could survive someone taking my wings, and I _Fell_. So you were demoted, and sent back down. What if you hadn’t been? Or what if you had, but without them taking your wings? Your heads? If you’d come down fighting fit maybe we wouldn’t have spoken again. Maybe you’d have been full of the fire of zealotry instead of upset and acting like a tit. Maybe if we didn’t speak for a while we’d have fought properly the next time we met.”

Aziraphale was looking at him with something like wonder. He blinked at the fountain, and swiped at his eyes with his free hand as he processed this. “I lay on the floor of the Judgement Theatre for... hours,” he said, slowly. Thoughtfully. “Hours and hours. Days. I don’t know. I crawled out, into my body. I fell down. Down from Heaven. Not Fell fell, you know, not. Not like that. But I didn’t know how to fly with only two wings. Crash landed east of Eden. And that’s when I…”

“When you broke my nose,” Crowley said, as though it was funny, but his voice was very gentle.

“Yes. Yes.” Aziraphale exhaled, slowly. His breath shivered out, and Crowley listened, very still. “Every single angel had watched. Ten million of them. But you were the only one who helped me. You held me up, when I couldn’t balance.”

“Only because you were making me seasick, with all your bobbing. Purely selfish, I promise.”

Aziraphale looked at him like the sky had looked down on him that day: he was so bright he was dazzling, blinding. “Wicked old thing,” he said softly.

“Flatterer.” Crowley squeezed his hand. “But if some other angel had helped, maybe he’d be your best friend now. And if you’d, I don’t know, confessed your feelings or whatever you’re upset about, if you’d done it earlier, maybe I’d have told you to fuck off. If you’d gone against Heaven at another time they’d have been able to kill you with hellfire, if they wanted. We don’t know. Right now we’re both alive, yeah? And… and we’re holding hands, in a posh garden. So, in my book, it all worked out.” He began to grin. “Ineffably.”

Aziraphale gave a surprised laugh, wet and beautiful, and smiled at him. “I suppose I deserved that.”

“You definitely did. Go on. Say I’m right,” Crowley preened. “Say it. ‘Crowley, you are right.’”

Aziraphale laughed again. He leant forward, and cupped his hands around Crowley’s jaw. Crowley could see every colour in his eyes: green and grey, blue and brown, flecks of gold around the pupil.

“Crowley, my own darling, you are right.”

*

Aziraphale had never understood the allure of what the children called ‘making out’ and which, one or two centuries behind the times, he thought of as ‘necking’, but he was receiving something of an education. Crowley was an excellent kisser: closed lips at first, then the swiftest and slightest touch of tongue, and then sharp teeth. At one point he bit Aziraphale’s ear sharply, which made him squeal; a sweep of tongue healed it, and Aziraphale realised it was for the benefit of a scandalised couple who had been staring at them from the other side of the garden.

“Couldn’t resist,” Crowley said, grinning into their next kiss.

“You are _wicked_ ,” said Aziraphale, hands tight in his hair.

“Unf, angel, you say the sweetest things.”

By the time they pulled apart Aziraphale was leaning back on the bench, and Crowley’s head was in his lap, one long leg hooked over the arm. Crowley’s hair was shot with fire in the sunlight, and Aziraphale played with it slowly. Aziraphale’s free left hand was linked with Crowley’s right, resting on his ludicrously flat abdomen.

“We can go back to London,” Aziraphale offered quietly. “I know we have to eventually. Better to get it over with.”

“Why don’t you want to go?” Crowley asked in the same tone.

Aziraphale looked at their hands for a moment or two before replying. “I hate that she was in my bookshop,” he confided softly. “Not just her, either. I hate that Gabriel and Sandalphon know where it is. I know they came here too, but… that didn’t feel the same. They couldn’t get in. And… before I used the circle, they were waiting for me outside too. I don’t think I told you. Michael, Uriel, and Sandalphon. They shoved me against the wall of Brewed Awakening and that’s _my_ coffee shop. I know the people there and they know which pastries I like, and it was mine. It was safe. And now it’s not. They could all be waiting for us there, right now.”

“They’d be fucking idiots to. Unfortunately, most angels are,” Crowley said, with a sad smile. An attempt at teasing. “But. Ngh. Yeah.” The syllables sounded hard in Crowley’s mouth. Reluctant. “I know what you mean. I haven’t been able to sleep in my flat since… Well. Hastur and Ligur. Last time I’ve been in there was when we did the swap. That’s why I’ve just been hanging around in the bookshop. When I tried to drive back to pick up that wine I turned around before I was even over the river.”

Aziraphale nodded, and his hand never stilled. “I thought I was scared before, but now I’m terrified. All the time. Terrified they’ll kill you. I thought she’d killed you.”

“She _didn’t_. And if they come again, we’ll beat them again.”

Aziraphale looked back at the fountain, and felt prickling heat in the corner of his eyes. He seemed to be on the verge of tears half the time at the moment, and he was exhausted from holding them back. He couldn’t understand it. “We could run away together.”

Crowley suddenly wasn’t breathing. Aziraphale could feel it, under their linked hands. God, what if Crowley said _no_? That’s what he deserved, a cruel voice in his guilty heart reminded him again. “… Alpha Centuri?”

“No. They need us here, now. The humans. For the next one…” He swallowed past the lump in his throat, then looked down. “I was thinking of Sussex.” He reached the limit of his courage, and pitched himself over the edge of the precipice. “It’s silly. I know it is – we could protect ourselves in London too, but… I find that now I _can_ be with you I don’t want to be apart.”

Crowley was staring at him, and Aziraphale felt the mortification, that wounded breathlessness that Crowley must have felt. He had hit the ground with a splatter. “Sorry. Forget I said anything – quite silly-“

“No, _no_ ,” breathed Crowley. “Sussex sounds. Yeah. Great. Sussex sounds great.”

Aziraphale couldn’t breathe. “I mean… we wouldn’t have to sell our London places. If you wanted to go back. I have some money put aside… But. A cottage, maybe.”

Crowley’s eyes were huge. He scrambled up, to properly look at Aziraphale without Aziraphale being able to look away. Aziraphale wished that Crowley would _say something_ , rather than torture him by making him force his barely glanced-at fantasies into unforgiving words.

“Somewhere near the sea. So we could fly over the channel. If we wanted. Space. I could carve the Shaddai over the doors and windows, that would help keep us safe… We could have a garden. A garden is a lovesome thing,” he quoted in his nerves, and came to a screeching halt. Better not to remember the rest of that poem.

Something was building up in Crowley. Some great nervous energy. His pupils roamed across his face, and Aziraphale realised with a jolt that he was looking for any sign of insincerity, for anything that could cast doubt on what Aziraphale was saying. Aziraphale grabbed his hands, and showed it to him: the burning fire at the heart of him, white and blue, unveiled.

Crowley gasped at it, and the fire burnt all the hesitation from his face. Crowley basked in the heat of it. _Like a snake_ , Aziraphale thought, on fire with love. _This is joy’s bonfire, then._

And Crowley smiled at him. “A greenhouse.”

Aziraphale laughed, and the water of the fountain danced higher in tune with his laughter. Neither noticed, but all around them the roses climbed, and bloomed in a riot. “Yes! Yes, of course a greenhouse. A hive for the honeybee. And we shall have some peace there.”

“Not if you insist on bloody bees – you’re going to want wildflowers, aren’t you, urgh. The greenhouse is mine, right? Off limits. I saw how you cocked up the Embassy gardens. _Brother Slug_ , honestly.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have the poor bees, then, if you’re going to spread a thousand nasty chemicals everywhere. … plenty of room for bookshelves, of course.”

“A proper big fireplace, like in the old days.”

“Not in the same room! In the kitchen. One of those fancy big showers for you.”

“Yeah, and a bathtub for you. I know you. You’re a menace with the bubble bath.”

“I do like it,” Aziraphale admitted, with a smile that probably looked quite idiotic. “… and a bedroom, of course.”

“Just the one?” Crowley said, and felt as though he’d managed to knock himself out with a rake. “No, I mean – as you don’t sleep – _shit_ -“

Aziraphale’s smile was tainted by uncertainty. “The last few days excepted… I mean, if I did, I’d wake you up, going on-“

“Sa- Go- Fuck,” Crowley spat. “No. No. Please. You could wake me up every five minutes, and I wouldn’t care. Sleep with me. Sleep in a bed with me, I mean, unless you want-“

“I’d like to sleep in a bed with you… if that would be all right?”

Crowley squeezed Aziraphale’s hand so hard he worried that he was hurting him. “Yes! _Yes_. That’d be all right.”

“I don’t know, yet, about– I’ve not – you know, all that business with the Nephilim-“

“No, no, no, don’t worry about it,” Crowley said, and kissed Aziraphale’s hand. “Conversation for another time. Never my top priority.”

“Nor mine,” Aziraphale said, with a huff of relief. “Never really thought much of it until now.”

Crowley laughed. “Calm down, angel! Don’t want to prove the old gammon right, do you?”

“The old – you are incorrigible, honestly. Forget everything I just said, I’d go mad within a day.” His smile belied his words, and he kissed Crowley’s hand in return.

“Nope. Contract signed now, can’t get rid of me that easily. You’re stuck with me.”

“Oh, no,” Aziraphale said, and beamed.

How strange it was, to feel an odd stab of gratitude to the angels. Even to Naqamiel. They had broken them out of the stunned fear that paralysed them after the Apocalypse. Had they not been so afraid again, so hurt, would Crowley be able to give such easy affection? Even to receive it?

He doubted it. Ineffability, once again. Crowley would make an optimist out of him eventually. With that thought he leant forward and kissed him. They had both waited for so long, and together they would find a way through fear – they were together, and other things still _mattered_ , but nothing so much as that simple fact.

“Mnh,” Crowley said as they pulled apart again. He looked at the fountain for a final moment, then magicked his sunglasses back on. “Come on, angel. Let’s head home.”

Aziraphale sighed, and straightened his shoulders. “Yes. There’s a lot to do… Houses, obviously. But I need to go to my tailors as well. I am grateful to you for manifesting these, but it’s not the same.”

“Only if I can come. If we’re going to be living together you need to wear something even _slightly_ more modern. I’d be embarrassed to be seen with you otherwise.”

He held out his hand to help Aziraphale up from the bench. Unnecessary, of course, but Aziraphale humoured him. “I agree. I think I could branch out a little. What do you think about _taupe_ – I think a waistcoat in a taupe velvet would look quite spiffing. Oh, or even _mink_ – no, I think that’s a little too dark, taupe it is.”

“You are torturing me. I know you’re doing this on purpose.”

“I thought taupe was stylish. Up to date, even.”

“But as a _velvet waistcoat_?”

Behind them, the fountain burbled happily, and the air was heavy with the scent of new-grown roses. Ahead of them lay a dozen check-out specifications for Crowley to flagrantly ignore, and beyond that lay London. And beyond London was a shimmering vision of a future, a half-dream of gardens and homes into which words had suddenly breathed colour.

Beyond that, of course, there was darkness in Aziraphale’s mind. There was fire, and the clash of weapons. The wars of Heaven and Hell.

But one could not see stars without darkness, and until then there was Crowley’s hand in his. “Velvet is lovely. You used to wear plenty of velvet. Remember that black velvet doublet you had, with the slashed sleeves and the enamel buttons?”

“Yeah, but only when velvet was _actually fashionable_.”

Aziraphale glanced sidelong at Crowley’s beautiful, beloved face, and knew exactly how to make him even more wonderful to look at. “Oh, you know what they say. ‘Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.’”

“… was that _Oscar Wilde_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale being Aziraphale, he refers to a lot of poetry in this chapter:
> 
>  _A hive for the honey-bee_ \- "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by W. B. Yeats
> 
> I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,  
> And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;  
> Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,  
> And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
> 
> And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,  
> Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;  
> There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,  
> And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
> 
> I will arise and go now, for always night and day  
> I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;  
> While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,  
> I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
> 
>  _A garden is a lovesome thing_ \- from the poem by Thomas Edward Brown:
> 
> A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!  
> Rose plot,  
> Fringed pool,  
> Fern'd grot—  
> The veriest school  
> Of peace; and yet the fool  
> Contends that God is not—  
> Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?  
> Nay, but I have a sign;  
> 'Tis very sure God walks in mine.
> 
>  _This is joy’s bonfire, then_ \- from "Eclogue : at the Marriage of the Earl of Somerset" by John Donne. I wanted to quote a whole section, so you must endure it here instead:
> 
> This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong arts  
> Make of so noble individual parts  
> One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.
> 
> The Nephilim appear in Genesis 6:1-4 and the Book of Enoch, and explain why Aziraphale would be cautious about sex.
> 
> The last quote is indeed Oscar Wilde.


End file.
